THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES 

PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE 

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION 

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH
 

convenes the 

NINETEENTH MEETING 

ADVISORY BOARD ON 

RADIATION AND WORKER HEALTH 

The verbatim transcript of the Meeting of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker 

Health held at The Westin Casuarina, 160 East Flamingo Road, Las 

Vegas, Nevada, on December 9 and 10, 2003. 

C O N T E N T S
 

December 9, 2003 

REGISTRATION AND WELCOME 

Dr. Paul Ziemer, Chair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 

Mr. Larry Elliott, Executive Secretary . . . . . . . . 9 
 

2 

PROGRAM STATUS REPORT 

Ms. Chris Ellison, NIOSH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 

STATUS REPORT - DEPARTMENT OF LABOR 

SITE PROFILE STATUS AND ROLL-OUT 

IMBA UPDATE 

WORKGROUP ON OPTIONS FOR EVALUATING INTERVIEWS 

Mr. Jeff Kotsch, DOL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 

Mr. Stu Hinnefeld, NIOSH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 

Mr. David Allen, NIOSH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 

Dr. James Melius, Workgroup Chair. . . . . . . . . . 137 

PUBLIC COMMENT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .188 

ADJOURN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 

C O N T E N T S
 

December 10, 2003 

REGISTRATION AND WELCOME 
 

248 

3 

Dr. Paul Ziemer, Chair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 

SANFORD COHEN & ASSOCIATES BRIEFING 

Dr. John Mauro, SC&A. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 

REVIEW AND APPROVAL OF DRAFT MINUTES - MEETING 18 

Dr. Paul Ziemer, Chair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

BOARD DISCUSSION/WORKING SESSION. . . . . . . . . . . . 255 

ADMINISTRATIVE HOUSEKEEPING AND BOARD WORK SCHEDULE 

Ms. Cori Homer, NIOSH; Dr. Paul Ziemer, Chair; Mr. Larry 

Elliott, Executive Secretary. . . . . . . . . . . . . 276 

BOARD DISCUSSION/WORKING SESSION. . . . . . . . . . . . 298 

PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .305 

ADJOURN PUBLIC SESSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 

COURT REPORTER'S CERTIFICATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 

 TRANSCRIPT LEGEND
 The following transcript contains quoted material. 

Such material is reproduced as read or spoken. 

In the following transcript a dash (--) indicates an 

unintentional or purposeful interruption of a sentence. An 

ellipsis (. . .) indicates halting speech or an unfinished 

sentence in dialogue or omission(s) of word(s) when reading 

written material. 

In the following transcript (sic) denotes an incorrect 

usage or pronunciation of a word which is transcribed in its 

original form as reported. 

In the following transcript (phonetically) indicates a 

phonetic spelling of the word if no confirmation of the 

correct spelling is available. 

In the following transcript "uh-huh" represents an 

affirmative response, and "uh-uh" represents a negative 

response. 

In the following transcript "*" denotes a spelling 

based on phonetics, without reference available. 

In the following transcript (inaudible) signifies 

speaker failure, usually failure to use a microphone. 
 

 

 

5 

P A R T I C I P A N T S
 

(By Group, in Alphabetical Order) 

 BOARD MEMBERS
 

CHAIR
 

ZIEMER, Paul L., Ph.D. 

Professor Emeritus 

School of Health Sciences 

Purdue University 

Lafayette, Indiana 

EXECUTIVE SECRETARY
 

ELLIOTT, Larry J. 

Director, Office of Compensation Analysis and Support 

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 

Cincinnati, Ohio 

MEMBERSHIP
 

ANDERSON, Henry A., M.D. 

Chief Medical Officer 

Occupational and Environmental Health 

Wisconsin Division of Public Health 

Madison, Wisconsin 

ANDRADE, Antonio, Ph.D. 

Group Leader 

Radiation Protection Services Group 

Los Alamos National Laboratory 

Los Alamos, New Mexico 

DeHART, Roy Lynch, M.D., M.P.H. 

Director 

The Vanderbilt Center for Occupational and Environmental 

Medicine 

Professor of Medicine 

Nashville, Tennessee 

ESPINOSA, Richard Lee 

Sheet Metal Workers Union Local #49 

Johnson Controls 
6 

Los Alamos National Laboratory 

Espanola, New Mexico 

GIBSON, Michael H. 

President 

Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Union 

Local 5-4200 

Miamisburg, Ohio 

GRIFFON, Mark A. 

President 

Creative Pollution Solutions, Inc. 

Salem, New Hampshire 

MELIUS, James Malcom, M.D., Ph.D. 

Director 

New York State Laborers' Health and Safety Trust Fund 

Albany, New York 

MUNN, Wanda I. 

Senior Nuclear Engineer (Retired) 

Richland, Washington 

OWENS, Charles Leon 

President 

Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Union 

Local 5-550 

Paducah, Kentucky 

PRESLEY, Robert W. 

Special Projects Engineer 

BWXT Y12 National Security Complex 

Clinton, Tennessee 

ROESSLER, Genevieve S., Ph.D. 

Professor Emeritus 

University of Florida 

Elysian, Minnesota 
 

 

7 

 AGENDA SPEAKERS
 

(in order of appearance) 

Ms. Chris Ellison, NIOSH 

Mr. Jeff Kotsch, DOL 

Mr. Stu Hinnefeld, NIOSH 

Mr. David Allen, NIOSH 

Dr. James Melius, Workgroup Chair 

Dr. John Mauro, SC&A 

STAFF/VENDORS
 

CORI HOMER, Committee Management Specialist, NIOSH 

STEVEN RAY GREEN, Certified Merit Court Reporter 

 AUDIENCE PARTICIPANTS
 

DENISE BROCK 

JULIA DEHART 

PATRICIA EHLMANN 

CHRIS ELLISON 

RUSS HENSHAW 

NICHOLE HERBERT 

STUART HINNEFELD 

LIZ HOMOKI-TITUS 

JEFF KOTSCH 

JOHN MAURO 

RICHARD MILLER 

DAVID NAIMON 
8 

LOUISE S. PRESLEY 

KNUTE RINGIN 

CHUCK ROESSLER 

BRIAN THOMAS 

RICHARD TOOHEY 

1 P R O C E E D I N G S 

2 Error!

3 (8:30 a.m.) 

4 REGISTRATION AND WELCOME 

5 DR. ZIEMER: Good morning. I'd like to call to order the 

6 19th meeting of the Advisory Board on Radiation and 

7 Worker Health. I'm Paul Ziemer, Chairman of the Board, 

8 and the other members of the Board are all present and 

9 you see their names on the placards before them. 

10 This is a slightly different venue than we're used to. If 

11 we do well today, I understand that we may become 

12 permanent replacements for Siegfried and Roy, but we'll 

13 see how it goes. If you're here expecting to hear 

14 David Brenner, you're here too early today. Besides, 

15 he charges $50 a person and this show is free. And 

16 they say you get what you pay for. 

17 I'd like to welcome not only staff from several Federal 

18 agencies, but other members of the public who may be 

19 here this morning. We'd like to remind all of you --
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Board members, Federal staff, contractor staff and 

members of the public -- to please register your 

attendance in the book that's out at the entrance. 

Also members of the public, if you wish to make public 

comment during one of the public comment periods, the 

first of which will be about mid-afternoon -- 2:45 --

to please sign up at that registration book so that we 

have some idea of how many will be presenting at that 

time. 

There are copies of a number of items on the table over here 

on my left near the rear. Some are presentations that 

will occur today. There's copies of the agenda. There 

are copies of past Board minutes and other related 

items, so please avail yourself of that information, as 

well. 

Finally, we do welcome you to Las Vegas. This seems like an 

appropriate place to talk about probabilities and 

risks, although I'm sure the view here gets distorted 

because people seem to think they can beat the 

probabilities. In any event, let me turn the mike over 

briefly to Larry Elliott to add a few comments. 

MR. ELLIOTT: On behalf of the Director of NIOSH, John 

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Howard, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, 

Secretary Thompson, I'd like to welcome the Board to 

Las Vegas. I'd like to welcome the public to this 

meeting. It is a public meeting. 

We would like to apologize for the particular forum that we 

are presented in here today. We typically use a 

different forum, a more level playing field, if you 

will, where the Board is on the same level with the 

audience. Unfortunately, in this hotel, the room that 

we had contracted was not available for us. It's not 

got a building inspection permit and there's an egress 

problem, so this was the only other space that was 

available to us. And because we have announced this 

public meeting in the Federal Register, we must hold it 

here at this address. And so we'll make do here today; 

I beg all your indulgences. 

We have a busy agenda, and I look forward to a productive 

meeting. Thank you. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Larry. The minutes for meeting 18, 

which was the meeting held in St. Louis, Missouri in 

October, were provided to the Board in their books, 

which many of them only got this morning. And the 

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minutes are fairly lengthy, so without objection, I'm 

going to defer action on the minutes until our meeting 

tomorrow. 

MS. MUNN: Thank you. 

DR. ZIEMER: I do ask the Board members in the meantime to 

spend their evening in their rooms reading the Board 

minutes. But more seriously and particularly, look at 

those areas in the minutes which summarize discussions 

that you might have contributed to to make sure that we 

have accurately rendered your thoughts. For example, 

I'm going to ask Dr. Roessler to check her thoughts --

the rendering of her thoughts because I can't figure 

them out in the minutes --

DR. ROESSLER: I'll see if I can. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- and I'm hopeful that she can, and there may 

be others like that, as well. I'm not picking on her, 

but I don't think the minutes maybe fully reflected 

what was being said. But particularly check those 

areas where there is sort of a summary of what your 

views or thoughts were on particular issues. 

And if you have other changes that you would like to make, 

we'd like to have those by tomorrow. And Ray, our 

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court recorder who also prepares the summary minutes 

for us, will be able to incorporate those changes 

before we issue the final copy. So be prepared 

tomorrow to identify any substantive changes and then 

we'll also get from you -- and you can turn them in on 

your own -- any grammatical changes that you might 

note. 

Are there any questions on those minutes other than the 

remarks I've just made? 

 (No responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, thank you very much. Then we will defer 

action on those until tomorrow. 

PROGRAM STATUS REPORT
 

We'd like to proceed then with the next item on the agenda, 

which is the program status report. Chris Ellison's 

going to present that for us today. I should point 

out, particularly for those in the audience, that 

because of the setup and the venue here, it may be a 

little awkward for you. The screen is over here on my 

right and about in the middle of the room, so those 

near the front may have to do a bit of twisting and 

turning to see the screen. 

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Chris, glad to have you here today. Please proceed. 

MS. ELLISON: Good morning. Can everyone hear me okay? 

UNIDENTIFIED: No. 

MS. ELLISON: Okay, before I proceed --

DR. ZIEMER: No. 

MS. ELLISON: No? 

DR. ZIEMER: Maybe a little closer, or they'll turn it up a 

little, perhaps. 

MS. ELLISON: Better? 

DR. ZIEMER: Yes. 

MS. ELLISON: Much better. This morning I'll be presenting 

the current program overview, and it's very similar to 

a lot of the format that you've seen before when Dave 

Sundin has been presenting this -- similar format. And 

then when I get done with this presentation, I also 

would like to show you a web page that we're working 

on. It's a different look at a lot of the program 

stats that we currently have. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Chris, if you put that on the right side, when 

you talk to the -- the screen, it'll pick your voice up 

better. 

MS. ELLISON: Better? Now as you know, we have started 

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receiving cases from the Department of Labor back in 

October of 2001, and this slide here shows the number 

of cases that we've received currently, based on each 

year. And at the current time, we're just under 15,000 

cases that we've received from the Department of Labor. 

And if things go at the current rate, it does appear 

that we'll probably hit 15,000 probably by the end of 

December. 

Now with those 15,000 cases that we have received, the 

number of cases that are considered Atomic Weapons 

Employer, or AWE, cases are just over 2,000, which is 

roughly still 14 percent, which is what it's been 

running now for quite some time. And then the number 

of cases that are non-AWE employees, which are the 

Department of Energy employees, is just a little more 

than 17,500 (sic). 

Now if you do your math real quick with those two numbers --

when I was putting together the presentation I added 

those numbers and I though that doesn't quite add up to 

the 14,895 that we're showing, so I did a little bit of 

investigative work, wondering why that was occurring, 

and I was told that more than likely the Department of 

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Energy has sent us some beryllium cases that we should 

not have had. 

Which leads me into the last number on this slide, which is 

the number of cases that we currently have in process 

or in-house that we're working on the dose 

reconstructions, which is just a little over 13,500. 

And those numbers are the active cases. It does not 

include cases that we have returned to the Department 

of Labor because we've completed the dose 

reconstructions. And there are some cases that are 

sent to us by mistake, which would include the 

beryllium cases, and sometimes we receive duplicate 

cases. So that 13,563 is actually what we have inhouse and we're working on the dose reconstructions 

right now. 

This is a trend chart, and I know you've seen it before, 

also. And what I've done is I've updated the fourth 

quar-- or the first quarter of fiscal year 2004. And 

based on this, you can see that the numbers are still 

continuing to decline in the number of cases that we 

receive from the Department of Labor. However, it does 

average out -- this is based at the end of November. 

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It is still averaging out just slightly over 200 a 

month. 

One of the first things that happens to the cases when we 

receive them from the Department of Labor, we do have 

to scan everything in that we receive and put it into 

the electronic database that we have. Once that is 

completed, the next thing that we do with the case is 

we do send a request to the Department of Energy for 

the exposure monitoring information. And this here 

shows the number of requests that we have currently 

sent to the Department of Energy, and that's just over 

14,000 requests. That does represent roughly 12,700 

claims or cases that we have. And keep in mind that a 

lot of these cases, if someone has worked at multiple 

sites, we do have to send out more than one request to 

cover all of the sites that they have worked at. 

Thus it gets to the next item up there, the responses we've 

received. And that's why that's a little bit higher 

than the number of total requests that we've sent out, 

which the responses now at almost 22,000. That 

accounts for the multiple sites that individuals have 

worked at, and then also sometimes the Department of 

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Energy sends us more than request -- or response to our 

request. They'll send it in partial pieces. 

The last item on this slide shows the number of outstanding 

requests that we have. We do ask that the Department 

of Energy try to fill our requests within 60 days, and 

we have been working with them in trying to get those 

requests in a timely manner. And here are some points 

and some days that the numbers are showing of the 

number of cases that are currently at those 60, 90, 120 

and 150 days. 

But I want to draw your attention to this next slide. I 

know this next slide -- you normally see it with some 

percentages off to the side, and I wanted to pull the 

percentages off to kind of make the numbers pop out and 

stand out a little bit more. And I do want to note a 

few things about this. We've been saying that we're 

continuing to see a little bit better response rate in 

getting the information to us in a more timely manner 

from the Department of Energy. And a couple of the 

sites I want to note that are on here have increased 

their percentage response rate from October. Savannah 

River Site in October they were showing a 78 percent 

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response rate; they are now showing an 86 percent 

response rate, so it has gone up a few percentages for 

Savannah River. 

Richland has also increased their response rate. It went 

from a 94 percent to a 98. Nevada Test Site, two 

percent increase; it went from a 97 to a 99 percent. 

And the last one that showed a fairly significant 

increase was the Idaho Operations Office, and they went 

from a 57 percent response rate to -- or a 50 percent 

response rate, excuse me, to a 57, so the continued 

meetings that we do have with the Department of Energy 

appear to be working. We must keep in mind also that, 

you know, the Department of Energy had to get their 

programs up and running in order to provide us these 

responses, so it does show that they are responding to 

the requests. 

Now the telephone interviews. As you know, the Act did not 

require that we conduct individual telephone interviews 

with the claimants, but we felt we wanted to build it 

into the process because it gave the -- gives the 

claimant the opportunity to provide us with any 

additional information that they may be aware of that 

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will help us in doing the dose reconstruction for their 

case. So currently our contractor, Oak Ridge 

Associated Universities, is working on the telephone 

interviews for us. And if you look, they've conducted 

at least one telephone interview for almost 9,000 

cases. And with -- once the telephone interview has 

been conducted, we do send a summary report to the 

claimant, and we ask them to review the summary report 

and provide us with any updates or corrections that 

they may see. And I'm showing that not quite 11,500 of 

those summary reports have been sent out. And the 

current capacity that ORAU is showing in conducting the 

interviews is still maintained at about 200 to 300 a 

week. 

Now the information that everyone's been waiting on, the 

dose reconstructions. In previous presentations there 

was one category called cases initiated. We now have 

the ability to break that into two different parts, and 

the first one is cases staged for dose reconstruction, 

which is roughly 2,700. What this means is these are 

cases who have all their telephone interviews 

completed. We have received dose information to do the 

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dose reconstruction. We've sent them a letter telling 

them that we've received all that information and, if 

applicable, a site profile has been completed for their 

site. Those cases are ready to be assigned. 

Therefore we have the next number is the number of DRs 

assigned. These are one -- cases that are currently 

assigned to a health physicist and we are working on 

the dose reconstructions, and that is at 631. 

The number of draft reports that are sent to a claimant are 

just about at 250, and those are ones where we've sent 

the dose -- draft dose reconstruction report to the 

claimant and asked them to review it. We will conduct 

a close-out interview with the claimant to explain the 

draft dose reconstruction report to them. And we also 

send at that time the OCAS-1 form and asking them to 

sign that and return that to us. 

And the last figure for the dose reconstruction statistics 

are the final ones sent to DOL. We also do send a copy 

to DOE, and those are just at over 1,000. Actually I 

called this morning. That number's gone up slightly. 

It's at 1,045. I wanted to see -- I did these stats 

Friday morning. I wanted to see how much it changed 

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over the weekend at the end of that day. 

The phone calls and the e-mails that we receive -- one thing 

that I reported last time at the October meeting was 

that we were going to be sending out an activity 

report. And if you look at the numbers -- there are 

large numbers that are up here. OCAS phone calls are 

almost at 26,000. ORAU phone calls are right around 

53,000. And there's a little bit of a reason for that 

difference. The phone calls that OCAS primarily takes 

are claimant calls, and ORAU contractor -- they do set 

up telephone interviews, and each time they attempt to 

contact a claimant, that is logged into our database. 

So that can account for why their numbers are slightly 

higher. 

However, since we did send the activity report out, I know 

that our public health advisors within OCAS have 

commented that the phones haven't been ringing quite as 

much, and I did look and they're down from -- let's 

see, October to November, the phone calls are down 

about 600 each month. They're a slight decline there. 

And the e-mails are pretty constant, still coming in and 

total within the system is just over 2,700 (sic). 

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And now the recent accomplishments that we've had with the 

program since the last meeting. In November we did 

appoint 36 additional physicians to the DOE physician 

panels, which brings the total to 159. Also, the 

residual contamination final report was released, and 

it is available on our web site. And I did mention the 

third item, we hit a milestone -- I believe it was last 

week -- with the 1,000 DRs completed and sent back to 

the Department of Labor. 

Now the last item on here -- these are also available on the 

web site -- are the various site profiles. And we have 

been publishing them and putting them on the web site 

once the items are available. From the time of the 

October meeting until now, we've placed several new 

documents on the web site, and I did try to remember to 

send an e-mail to the Advisory Board to let you know 

when this has been done. We've added an AWE and a DOE 

site-wide documents, I believe there are two for the 

DOE facilities. Also the Hanford site profile is now 

complete. I just posted the introduction on the web 

site. There is now a site profile for the Huntington 

Pilot Plant and with INEEL, Portsmouth and X-10, we 

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posted part of the site profile. It was -- the site 

description has been posted, and the other pieces are 

now pending. And then we have Y-12 with the site 

description and the dosimetry. 

That's all I have basically for the stats. Are there any 

questions before I go on? 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Chris. Let me begin with a couple 

of points for clarification. 

MS. ELLISON: Sure. 

DR. ZIEMER: The slide number -- I think it's slide six, you 

have interview summary reports sent to claimants, 

11,499. 

MS. ELLISON: Uh-huh. 

DR. ZIEMER: And you also listed cases for which one or more 

interview is completed, 8,954. Clarify the difference 

in those two numbers. 

MS. ELLISON: The 8,954 represents the number of telephone 

interviews for at -- at least of which one interview is 

conducted. 

DR. ZIEMER: One or more. 

MS. ELLISON: At least one. 

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

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MS. ELLISON: Right, and with a lot of the cases there are 

multiple survivors, each survivor or applicant has the 

opportunity to participate --

DR. ZIEMER: So there are multiple summaries --

MS. ELLISON: Right. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- in some cases then. 

MS. ELLISON: That 8,954 represents per case --

DR. ZIEMER: Gotcha. 

MS. ELLISON: -- that's the total number of cases. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

MS. ELLISON: Where the summary is total numbers of summary, 

not... 

DR. ZIEMER: And then on the next slide where you give 

number of draft reports sent to claimants, I assume 

that's just the number that are currently out there --

MS. ELLISON: Right, that we're waiting --

DR. ZIEMER: -- that last column, final draft reports, at 

one time -- or the final -- the final reports, not 

draft --

MS. ELLISON: Uh-huh. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- at one time were drafts, so that this 249 

drafts is just what's currently --

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MS. ELLISON: Right, that's currently what we're waiting on 

that OCAS-1 to come back. There's 249 out there. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. 

MS. ELLISON: Uh-huh. One more thing -- any other questions 

on the slide presentation? 

DR. ZIEMER: There's one question here, start with Bob, then 

we'll come down. 

MR. PRESLEY: Do you think --

DR. ZIEMER: Use the mike, Robert. 

MR. PRESLEY: Robert Presley. Chris, do you have any reason 

why that Savannah River and Idaho and Los Alamos -- has 

DOE given you any reason why that they've got so many 

that are better than 150 days? 

MS. ELLISON: I know that we have been in contact with them 

and we are working with them and they are setting up 

their systems. A lot of those -- those three that you 

named off, I didn't provide their percentages because 

they're maintaining the constant level from the last 

time, so -- I do know that we are working with them in 

trying to get those, and have identified specifically 

which of the cases that we're waiting on so they are 

aware of that and they are working on them. 

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MR. PRESLEY: Thank you. 

MS. ELLISON: Uh-huh. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, Jim? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, just to follow up on that, the -- those -

- you have a large number of cases that are over 150 

days for those -- I think those three sites that were 

just mentioned. Are those sites -- I take it those go 

-- are any of those ever getting cleared or is that 

just sort of a steady, you know, number --

MS. ELLISON: No, we are receiving --

DR. MELIUS: -- constant -- but -- but are we receiving --

are -- is there a group out there that they're not 

finding records on or are they just -- is that just a 

question of the flow through the system as things come 

back from -- 'cause that's a long time for a claimant 

to wait and --

MS. ELLISON: Right. In the monthly reports we do specify 

which claims or cases that we are waiting on the 

information, and we do require the Department of Energy 

to send us a response saying no, they cannot find any 

information. So in those cases they have not indicated 

that they cannot find anything. 

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DR. ZIEMER: I think Larry has some additional comments and 

--

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, let me ask one additional point 'cause 

then Larry can answer them both. Is the Iowa -- the 

Iowa site, which isn't listed there, but if -- as I 

recall from a couple of meetings ago, there was a major 

problem in getting records from that site and has that 

been resolved? 

MS. ELLISON: Yes, it has. I'll let Larry answer that. 

MR. ELLIOTT: To your first question, let me respond that 

some of those numbers that you see there are static. 

They've been there from the start and we're working on 

those individual cases with that respective site to 

understand better what is going on. And in some cases, 

yes, they are having trouble even verifying that the 

person actually, in their records, worked at the site, 

perhaps, because they might have been verified by Labor 

as having worked at the site by IRS records or some 

other sort of record system. The majority of those --

those numbers that you saw, though, change. It's a --

it's a small group that we see as static, and we're 

working on all of the numbers. 

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The Idaho site had to index -- had to scan all of their 

boxes of records -- thousands of boxes of records, and 

then index through that scanning effort so that they 

could retrieve a person's history of dose. And that 

took a while to do and that has been completed. And in 

fact, our ORAU team has aided the Idaho site by 

providing some further contract support to people who 

are working on that indexing effort who are now 

searching for those records for those individuals. So 

we've accommodated that through that particular site. 

Now to your second question, the Iowa plant, yes, that -- we 

have I think received five or six boxes of records that 

were held by the Department of Defense, and that's been 

very critical. They're in the hands of the Technical 

Basis Document team right now going through that 

information. So we're working each one of these 

situations independently and as best we can. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, I just had a question -- or a couple of 

questions. First one's on the telephone interview. 

MS. ELLISON: Uh-huh. 

MR. GRIFFON: It says 200 to 300 per week. Do you know how 

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many interviewers on average are doing -- are 

conducting the interviews? 

MS. ELLISON: I might have to ask Dave to answer that. I 

know --

MR. GRIFFON: Ten? Is that the --

UNIDENTIFIED: About ten. 

MR. GRIFFON: Ten? 

MS. ELLISON: About ten? 

MR. GRIFFON: And is there -- has there been any effort --

maybe Dick can answer this, too, as -- are -- are there 

certain people who are doing certain sites? Are you 

grouping them with interviewers that have expertise or 

knowledge of certain facilities or how -- how is that 

being... 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, I think Dick Toohey may be able to 

respond to this. There -- is that mike working? Yes. 

DR. TOOHEY: (Off microphone) Is this one on? 

MS. ELLISON: No. 

DR. ZIEMER: Is there a mike we can use for --

MR. ELLIOTT: He's got it working now. 

DR. TOOHEY: Okay, yeah, there we go. Okay. Actually we 

have a total of 16 interviewers, but with, you know, 

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vacation, things like that, the average working a day 

is probably 12 to 14. Our goal has always been to get 

them to be site-specific. But since we're still in 

kind of what I'll call a batch mode where we're --

we're trying to knock all the Hanfords out, all the 

Savannah Rivers out, the sites where we have the site 

profiles completed -- we're not really doing that yet. 

MR. GRIFFON: Okay. Just one more. On the slide before 

that, you talked about the data requests to DOE and the 

percentage of responses, and I think -- I've tried to 

ask this before and I'm not sure how clear I was, but 

first of all, does -- do those statistics include data 

requests for information that might be used for the 

site profiles, or is that only for personal dosimetry 

records or... 

MR. ELLIOTT: It's only -- those numbers represent the 

requests that we've sent for personal dose information. 

The requests that we've made to DOE for site profile 

is tracked in a separate system. 

MR. GRIFFON: So anything in here, it's fair to say, is 

personal dosimetry or medical records or work history 

records or those sorts of things. Right? 

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MR. ELLIOTT: Dosimetry records, not medical records. Not 

medical. Dosimetry records -- there may be -- in those 

numbers there may be requests for -- if they couldn't 

find personal monitoring information, there might be a 

request for co-worker data or alternate -- you know, 

the hierarchy of data that we seek. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Tony Andrade, and then back to Roy. 

DR. ANDRADE: I just wanted to comment that one thing we 

should not forget is that dosimetry records are 

difficult, in and of themselves, to understand and to 

send back in the appropriate format for dose 

reconstruction, especially in the case of inhalation. 

Way back in the early days we used to have limits 

imposed on us in terms of body burden, and so some of 

the data that were recorded were in terms of 

percentages of body burden. Then in the early 90's --

well, after World War II and then on into the 90's, 

dosimetry records for, in particular, inhalation 

uptakes were kept in terms of annual doses. So those 

are easy. Those are easy if you're talking about an 

employee at a -- at one facility, who's never worked 

elsewhere. 

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When you start to have to add records from places that an 

employee may have worked, then that becomes a little 

bit more difficult. 

Then after about the early 90's, legislation was passed such 

that we had to maintain those type data in terms of 

committed effective dose equivalent. That's a 50-year 

dose. It's basically an exponential function of the 

dose that you will receive within your body of the 

radionuclides as they sit there and decay. So given 

that NIOSH requires these data in terms of annual dose, 

they have to go back and work with that function and go 

back and formulate and formulate it in terms of years. 

So when somebody says oh, how come these people aren't 

responding so quickly, just factor that into your 

thinking, especially at Los Alamos where we worked with 

uranium and with plutonium and have kept records for 

people coming in from other facilities. Let me just 

say it's not an easy process to send back dose records 

very quickly for one person. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Comment or response from Larry, and then 

we'll go to Roy. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I appreciate Dr. Andrade's comment, but I 

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would -- I feel the need to clarify something. We 

don't ask for annual cumulative dose. We ask for the 

raw numbers that were used to build that annual 

cumulative dose, and I think that even goes further to 

add to the difficulty of providing a response to our 

request, because we need -- you know, if the badge 

exchange frequency was a monthly basis, that's what we 

want to see. If the bioassay was done on a quarterly 

basis or an annual basis or what have you, we want to 

see the raw numbers. That's what we're after. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Okay, Roy. 

DR. DEHART: In the presentation you indicated that the 

final dose reconstruction was sent to the claimants 

approximately -- a little over 1,000. What kinds of 

responses are coming in from those claimants who are 

receiving those doses? 

MS. ELLISON: In the finals? 

DR. DEHART: On the finals, yes. 

MS. ELLISON: As far as I -- once -- it's a final copy of 

the report to let them know that it has been forwarded 

then to -- to the Department of Labor for final 

adjudication. 

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DR. DEHART: Are they making any comments in -- back to you 

as to correct or --

MS. ELLISON: Not on finals that I'm aware of. I would 

think minimal -- you may --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, let me ask either Larry or Dick Toohey --

MS. ELLISON: -- need to ask... 

DR. ZIEMER: -- also to address that. I think they do have 

the opportunity to comment on that, so what -- I think 

that's the question, are we -- are we in fact getting 

comments and what are the nature of those. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yeah, and I think Dr. DeHart's question is on 

the OCAS-1 stage --

MS. ELLISON: Right. 

MR. ELLIOTT: -- because that's the stage where we send a 

draft dose reconstruction report to the claimant with 

this OCAS-1 form that they are asked to sign off on, 

which imparts that they have no further information to 

provide and allows us then to move the complete dose 

reconstruction over to the Department of Labor. We do 

hear comments back at the OCAS-1 stage. A lot of 

people -- it runs the gamut from thank you, I finally 

have an answer, to I don't agree with what you've done, 

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to writing things on the OCAS-1 that have no bearing on 

the case but we have to take that into account. And 

this is all captured and tracked in the administrative 

record, so it runs the gamut. I would offer that the 

majority of OCAS-1's that are returned to us are simply 

signed off on and -- and that's it. We don't have any 

further -- further commentary that is provided at that 

point. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Mike Gibson. 

MR. GIBSON: Just another comment that complicates I think 

the issue of the dose reconstruction is at least some 

of the sites, if not all, when the records were kept 

some years ago it was just recorded in gross alpha, not 

specifically the radioisotopic -- that was -- that was 

used, so it could -- it could make a difference in the 

dose consequence. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. And certainly the internal dose 

issues are complex, depending on the site. 

Any further comments? 

MR. ELLIOTT: Chris has a little more to show. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, Chris, you have some additional --

MS. ELLISON: I have one more piece --

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DR. ZIEMER: One more piece. 

MS. ELLISON: -- if you'll bear with me. Currently on our 

web site we have a claim information page, and if you 

have looked at it, it gives running totals for the 

various steps in our dose reconstruction. Our -- the 

director of NIOSH, Dr. Howard, has requested and wanted 

to see specifically of the cases we have in-house just 

where are they in our system. So we've developed a 

flow chart and we're currently working on developing it 

and getting it on the web site, and I plan on sending 

screen shots to the Board once it's a little bit 

further along, so you'll see this before it goes up on 

the web site. 

Basically it breaks down the cases that we have in-house and 

shows which individual step the cases are in. And with 

each of the steps, you can click on the boxes and there 

will be a breakdown then of the information contained 

on the site. The gather exposure information -- I'm 

having a hard time getting it to scroll down for me, 

there we go. Oh, it does break -- we have most of the 

information broken down into the four district offices 

that we receive the information from, but we're hoping 

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that this will kind of show the public a little bit 

better specifically where that 14,000-plus cases are in 

our system, how many of them are actually waiting on 

the exposure information, how many of them are at the 

telephone interview stage. And that's primarily just 

what I wanted to show you, the draft DR's and things. 

Any questions? 

DR. ZIEMER: Jim? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. I don't think most people out there 

really care about the DOL district offices. Is there 

any way you can break it down by site? I know people 

work at more than one site, but how you count that gets 

a little complicated, but it certainly would be a more 

meaningful --

MS. ELLISON: Okay. 

DR. MELIUS: -- number for people to --

MS. ELLISON: Like I said, right now we're working on that -

-

DR. MELIUS: I understand, I'm just saying --

MS. ELLISON: -- (Inaudible) right, and those are the type 

of comments we're looking for. 

DR. MELIUS: 'Cause I think that would be -- help -- help 

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people, and if there's a way you could array the -- a 

screen that would have the -- the different steps and 

the numbers and just as a table that people could look 

at quickly by site, maybe it's another -- another page 

or something that would --

MS. ELLISON: Okay. 

DR. MELIUS: -- with the sites down the left-hand column --

MS. ELLISON: Thank you. 

DR. MELIUS: -- I think that would be helpful. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, good suggestion. Any other comments 

or suggestions? Henry? 

DR. ANDERSON: Just one. That would be -- we're on our 

number 19 meeting, and I guess one thing that would be 

helpful is it's nice to see the numbers changing and 

advances being made, but it's hard to come up with an 

overview as are we catching up, are we further --

falling further behind. The process seems to be now 

kind of in play, the number of requests coming in are -

- appear to be going down, but with 504 in the last 

quarter, it just -- grossly it appears to me as though 

we may be falling even further behind, so it'd be nice 

if we could have some kind of a summary of what changes 

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have been made, you know, what new is coming in --

MS. ELLISON: Uh-huh. 

DR. ANDERSON: -- and you know, how many we -- we can see 

how many are going out, but where do we stand on the 

overall program of -- can we say we're starting to eat 

into that backlog? 

MS. ELLISON: Okay. Thank you. 

DR. ZIEMER: Other comments, suggestions? 

MS. ELLISON: And as I said, I plan on sending screen shots 

of the various screens for further comment and for 

further review. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. 

MS. ELLISON: Uh-huh. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. We appreciate your presentation, Chris. 

MS. ELLISON: Thank you. 

STATUS REPORT - DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
 

DR. ZIEMER: The next item on our agenda is a status report 

from Department of Labor. Jeff Kotsch is here this 

morning with us and he'll make that presentation. 

Jeff. 

MR. KOTSCH: I think it's on, isn't it? 

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, it's on. 

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MR. KOTSCH: Good morning. My name's Jeff Kotsch. I'm the 

health physicist with the Department of Labor's 

program. Pete Turcic was unable to attend this morning 

because he has a DOL management meeting this week, but 

we pretty much promise you'll see Peter next time, so 

hopefully that'll be the case. 

We're -- all of this data is pretty much current as of 

November 27th of this year, and one problem that we 

wrestle with is always trying to synchronize with --

trying to get our numbers to kind of match NIOSH 

numbers, and I know it drives my bosses, both Pete and 

Shelby, crazy when we can't come up with the exact 

numbers, but I don't know that we'll ever get there, 

but we'll -- I think we're fairly close. But you just 

have to keep that in mind. 

The total number of claims received to date or as of 

November 27th is 49,113. The first five categories up 

there are primarily the ones that are covered under the 

statute, and the last one, the other, is -- is the ones 

that are not. Those are the respiratory conditions 

that we get -- the COPD's, the asbestosis, the heart 

conditions, things like that -- things that are not 

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covered by the statute. 

The bulk of the ones that are covered are primarily cancers, 

33,766, and then the rest are -- as indicated there --

the beryllium sensitivities, the CBD -- the chronic 

beryllium disease, the silicosis and the RECA 

compensation that's part of the Department of Justice 

program. 

Now one thing during this presentation, we're shifting 

between cases and claims, and just so you get -- have 

to keep in mind again that the cases -- there's one 

case for every employee, but there's -- and if the 

employee's still surviving, he's the claimant, but if 

he's deceased then you either have a spouse or one or 

more children as a claimant so the claimant number is 

always -- or the number of claims is always greater 

than the number of cases. 

So there's just, reading left to right, the case status in 

the Department of Labor, 14,838 cases that were sent to 

NIOSH as of November 27th. Recommended decisions were 

issued by the four district offices, a little over --

about 21,400. And if you go over -- well, I'll just go 

left to right. Pending final decisions, about 1,500. 

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Those would be in our FAB -- the final adjudication 

branch -- in the four district offices, as well as our 

national office. And then the FABs also issued about 

19,900 decisions. 

Pending action, the second from the right, about 1,500 cases 

are still pending some kind of review in our district 

offices. And then the total number of cases is 37,192. 

For the final decisions, the claim approval is 10,729 and 

denial is 14,324, and then the recommended decisions 

are about 11,200 for approval and claims denied of 

about 16,500. Again there's the NIOSH -- the number of 

cases sent to NIOSH, the payments issued as of November 

27th are 9,483. The amount of compensation is $700 

million 474,000 or 475,000. The amount of medical 

benefits paid is $21 million about 205,000. And 

there's a summary of the total claims, the total cases. 

The initial decisions, these are the point at which we 

either -- when we consider initial decisions, the point 

where we either have gotten to the point where we send 

the case on to NIOSH for dose reconstruction or, if 

it's not a cancer case or it's something we can 

continue adjudication on -- the SEC cases, the 

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beryllium cases, the silicosis cases and the -- and the 

ones that are covered under the (Inaudible), but any 

one that referring for -- I'm sorry -- so anyway, 

recommended decisions for 27,000 about 700 claims, 

recommended decisions for the -- of that 21,000 about 

400 cases. So at that point we're about 96 percent 

completed as far as the process goes to get to the 

initial decision, either forward it to NIOSH or just to 

continue with the recommended decision. 

Again there's a summary of the claims and the cases. The 

final decisions, with 25,053 claims of which there's 

19,835 cases. And there's the percentage of final 

decisions, about 53 percent. And the bulk of those 

would be the NIOSH cases that are still awaiting some 

decision as far as going to a final decision. 

That's just the breakdown of the way the claims are. That's 

the 25,053 total claims distributed (Inaudible) down 

10,729 finals approved, 14,324 denied. The bulk of the 

denials is that purple column there. Those are the 

non-covered conditions -- the respiratory, the heart, 

the other types of conditions that are not covered 

under the statute. And then in decreasing order, the -

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- 2,318 for the employees that are not covered at -- or 

worked -- had worked at covered facilities, ineligible 

survivors, conditions not related to employment, 

insufficient medical evidence, and then cancers not 

related with POC's less than 50 percent. 

As far as processing time, I think the last time we went 

through by quarter the processing times for the last 

year and we saw that as far as the Department of Labor 

that the percentages were coming below our target goals 

and continue to be that way. For the last quarter the 

average initial processing time for the AWE, beryllium 

vendor, DOE subcontractor claims is 103.5 days versus a 

goal of 180 since we assumed that it's harder to --

it's -- it has taken longer to get that information. 

The average initial processing time for the DOE and 

RECA claims is about 76 days against a target of 120 

days. 

Status of the referral of the 14,000 -- what we see as the 

14,838 claims and cases that have gone for NIOSH 

referrals as of the 27th of November, the cases --

we're showing 100 -- or I'm sorry, 1,146 cases returned 

from NIOSH. I think the NIOSH number is lower. Then 

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again this is one of our disconnects I know we're 

working on with our systems people to look at these 

cases and to see how we report these things between 

ourselves and how -- I guess also how we're looking at 

what constitutes cases. And those are the breakdowns 

for the completed cases returned to NIOSH -- cases with 

recommended decisions, we have had 863, the acceptance 

is 321 of those, 542 denied. Cases with final 

decisions, 478, of which a little more than half, 254, 

have been accepted as of November 27th. That's the end 

of this. 

The one thing I just wanted to comment on is the last time 

we spoke about -- or you asked questions about -- or 

DOL outreach activities. Pete mentioned to me -- when 

I went back I talked to Shelby and Pete. We certainly 

are doing outreach. We have developed a plan for that 

and Pete asked me if he could just present that at the 

next meeting, that would be fine. So if there are any 

questions? 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Jeff. Do you have any specific 

numbers on the number of SEC cases that have been 

processed? 

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MR. KOTSCH: No. I mean I don't -- not with me. I -- this 

is not -- the case numbers are things that I don't 

normally deal with as part of my job, and I'm just 

trying to think back to the statistics I've seen. I 

don't know whether --

DR. ZIEMER: It seems to me that might be of interest to us 

to -- maybe next time --

MR. KOTSCH: I certainly -- I know we -- I know we break 

those numbers --

DR. ZIEMER: I'm sure you have the numbers. I think it 

would be of interest to this Board to know how many SEC 

cases have been processed and --

MR. KOTSCH: Yeah, we can do that. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- and approved. Leon, a question? 

MR. OWENS: The initial processing claims time, is that 

inclusive of the time that it takes DOE to do the 

records retrieval, or is that excluded? 

MR. KOTSCH: That includes the time that we get -- well, 

that -- that does include the time for us to get answer 

back from DOE as far -- at least as far as employment 

goes. And certainly -- I mean the NIOSH process is 

more of -- time-consuming because they're going out for 

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another document retrieval that's more extensive than 

the one we have. And we also default -- sometimes if 

we don't get a response back by -- from DOE in a 

sufficient amount of time, we'll default to other 

mechanisms like Social Security and things like that to 

confirm employment 'cause we're primarily after 

confirming the medical conditions and confirming 

employment. 

MR. OWENS: Okay, so in the event that you don't receive the 

records from DOE in what the Department feels is a 

timely manner, then you would resort to other agencies 

in order to try and verify that employment? 

MR. KOTSCH: Yeah, I mean we continue to ping DOE as far as, 

you know, trying to get a response one way or the other 

from them that they either do not have records or 

they're unable to provide records, and then we'll move 

forward. I mean we continue to seek from them the 

records that -- but we try to get the response back 

from them that they -- that they do not have records 

before we move on to the Social Security or union labor 

-- labor records or things like that. 

DR. ZIEMER: Tony and Jim and Gen. 

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DR. ANDRADE: Once a case has been considered to be at what 

you call initial decision, what is the time between 

that point and the point that the case is sent to 

NIOSH? And also I'm just curious, how is the case sent 

to NIOSH? Is it just a direct digital transfer or some 

other means? 

MR. KOTSCH: No, the -- what -- when a case -- for the NIOSH 

cases, basically once we've developed the information 

on employment and medical condition, there's no real --

as soon as that's assembled, that information is now 

transferred to NIOSH. There's no -- I don't -- I don't 

know how to ascribe a time to that. When it is 

transferred, it's unfortunately transferred as a hard 

copy. The case file is copied by Department of Labor 

and a copy goes to NIOSH. We have looked in the past 

to -- especially with the NIOSH referral summary 

document, which is our basically summary of the case, 

transferring that to NIOSH digitally so at least that 

would -- that could -- that could be done and we're 

still looking into that. But our two systems 

unfortunately are not highly -- our computer systems 

are not really compatible with one another. 

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DR. ZIEMER: Jim? 

DR. MELIUS: Going back to the SEC case issue, one of the 

things that we talked about many meetings ago and I 

think it may be useful to tie together in this context 

is that there are also a number of cases that -- from 

the SEC sites that don't meet the criteria in terms of 

the amount of time worked, that sort of overlap between 

the SEC program and the NIOSH program, and at some 

point there's some issues with how -- how those are 

going to be dealt with that we have decide on --

presumably also at some point Ted Katz'll finally get 

his job done and we'll have SEC regs out there and 

we'll be able to -- I think that's one of the issues we 

have to deal with, so it may be a way of tying this all 

together that I guess is what I'm proposing to -- that 

we as a Board need to be thinking about, and NIOSH 

does, also. And I think it would be helpful if we knew 

the numbers involved in this overlap area and in some 

of the situations so we can sort of think about how to 

-- how to approach it. 

DR. ZIEMER: Jim, you're asking about the numbers who don't 

meet the time requirement at the SEC sites who may have 

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submitted for a claim anyway or --

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, they've submitted for a claim, they don't 

meet the time requirements --

DR. ZIEMER: Time requirements --

DR. MELIUS: -- for the SEC sites --

DR. ZIEMER: Which is basically the 250-day -- yeah. 

DR. MELIUS: They fall in between the sort -- the --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, I understand. 

DR. MELIUS: -- you know, are they an SEC, we don't -- we 

can't really deal with this till we have the SEC regs 

out, but at that point sort of having the numbers and 

understanding the numbers involved, the situations 

involved, I think may help in terms of dealing with 

this issue. 

DR. ZIEMER: Larry, response? 

MR. ELLIOTT: So you're asking, Jim, for the numbers of 

cases that were submitted but didn't qualify under the 

SEC. 

DR. MELIUS: So they come to NIOSH --

MR. ELLIOTT: They come to NIOSH for dose reconstruction. 

DR. MELIUS: Reconstruction, and there's this issue of how 

do you account -- how are we going to do their dose 

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reconstruction and... 

MR. ELLIOTT: Well, we are doing dose reconstruction for 

those cases. We've actually returned several cases for 

Piketon, Paducah and K-25. 

DR. MELIUS: And we need to look at that issue. That's what 

I'm saying. 

DR. ZIEMER: Gen Roessler. 

DR. ROESSLER: Jeff, on your slide number four you gave some 

dollar numbers. It was $700 million paid out in 

compensation and about $21 million in medical benefits. 

I think -- I'm surprised that the medical benefits is 

a small fraction of the total compensation and I'm 

wondering what the reason for that is, a number of 

claimants have died or... 

MR. KOTSCH: Well, part of it is that if you're -- if you're 

in a survivor condition, there's no medical payments. 

It's just a $150,000 compensation. If you have an 

employee who's surviving, then he will submit for 

medical benefits. Early on we were surprised that they 

were not submitting for medical benefits. There were 

some problems I think with the health care providers, 

you know, accepting our -- basically our compensa-- or 

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trying to come directly to use, that's the way we 

wanted to work it. We didn't want it to have to go 

through the -- you know, the employee to pay them. We 

wanted to do it directly, so there were some -- some 

things there that had to be corrected to move forward. 

But yeah, we're surprised, too, that the number's a 

little bit lower than we expect. 

DR. ZIEMER: Henry? 

DR. ANDERSON: I don't remember the actual numbers on your 

slide, but it appeared there were quite a number of 

cases where the medical records were insufficient or 

something like that, and I was wondering what -- what -

- what other kind of things that are insufficient? The 

individual has said that they had a disease and then 

the record review couldn't document that, and what's 

kind of the step after that, is -- you know, what 

further do you do if -- if they say they have it but 

the hospital has destroyed records or something? 

MR. KOTSCH: Yeah, and that's primarily I think what the 

issue is. I know I'm looking at a case right now where 

there's -- you know, the physician came back and said I 

don't remember exactly treating your husband back in 

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1970 and my office destroyed all the records, you know, 

after they're ten years old kind of thing. Then you're 

left basically with -- you know, if the doctor doesn't 

remember -- the physician doesn't remember, and some do 

write fairly extensive letters that, you know, well, I 

don't have records, I -- you know, remember that, you 

know, I worked with this patient and -- and he had 

these kinds of conditions over this pa-- you know, over 

those years. All we can do is ask for affidavits or 

try to get other information from the medical people. 

Occasionally -- and we're always amazed that sometimes 

people have kept their records, even though they've 

been destroyed by the hospitals but they personally 

have kept them, which has really been of benefit to 

them, obviously, when the records unfortunately no 

longer exist, you know, in the hospital. But yeah, 

it's a difficult thing for us and -- to try to find --

or help the claimant find the medical evidence that 

provides us with something that substantiates the 

claim. 

DR. ZIEMER: Jeff, can you speak to us about the numbers of 

appeals for both NIOSH final decision cases and what I 

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would -- I'll call right now the non-NIOSH, the ones 

that don't require dose reconstruction, which would 

include your -- I don't know, any of the other ones 

that you're handling, but what's the experience on the 

appeals -- of the denials? 

MR. KOTSCH: Yeah --

DR. ZIEMER: I assume no one's appealing the acceptances. 

MR. KOTSCH: No, no one appeals the acceptances. I -- and 

unfortunately, I don't have real good numbers for you. 

I -- and the only things I really work with, I happen 

to be the focal point for the technical objections to 

the NIOSH dose reconstructions, and I've seen about or 

I have on my desk probably -- I mean have total, since 

the beginning, maybe 24 or 25 cases that have technical 

appeals to the NIOSH process. As far as the overall 

numbers of the objections to the process itself, I'm 

sure it's much higher because it wouldn't be just -- it 

would be denials for all the other things and not just 

the NIOSH cases. We can certainly bring those numbers 

the next time, as far as both the general objection 

rate to the FAB decisions as well -- or the recommended 

decisions, and as well as the ones that relate to the 

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NIOSH (Inaudible) --

DR. ZIEMER: Well, I don't know if one distinguishes between 

objections and formal appeals. I mean someone may 

object, but I'm asking --

MR. KOTSCH: The appeal -- appeal process is on the final. 

They have an opportunity at the recommended decision 

stage to object, and then it goes forward. That's 

included in -- by FAB into --

DR. ZIEMER: Is that, what you're calling an objection, kick 

off an appeal process then? 

MR. KOTSCH: Well, the -- what -- I'm sorry, I should 

clarify myself. The objections -- when I talk 

objections, I'm talking mostly at the recommended 

decision stage. And then they can go into the -- that 

can be factored into the final decision and at that 

point is kind of what the appeal process is -- there's 

a couple of elements --

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

MR. KOTSCH: -- you know. 

DR. ZIEMER: And that's what I was asking you about. Maybe 

someone can let us know next time how that's --

MR. KOTSCH: Yeah, we can (Inaudible) as far as the fin-- we 

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-- all the things I'm looking as far as technical 

objections are at the recommended decision stage. 

DR. ZIEMER: Roy, you had a question? 

DR. DEHART: Actually it was just an expansion on the 

medical record or lack thereof that we're seeing. A 

panel of three physicians reviews -- currently, at 

least -- the information that's provided from the 

Office of Employee Advocacy, and we have seen records 

that have come to us that have no medical documentation 

at all. There is no diagnosis that's documented. 

There is no record of treatment or management. Those 

are typically elderly people who have passed away and 

the relative is filing on their behalf, and they have 

no access -- they don't even know perhaps what hospital 

or what doctor. And of course there's no way we can 

move forward with anything on those kinds of -- that 

lack of information. 

MR. KOTSCH: Those are for the subpart (d) cases --

DR. DEHART: Yes. 

MR. KOTSCH: -- but yeah, admittedly we see the same thing 

in the subpart (b) cases. 

DR. ZIEMER: Further questions? Thank you, Jeff. 

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MR. KOTSCH: Okay. 

DR. ZIEMER: Appreciate your input this morning. 

We're a little bit ahead of schedule, but I think we'll go 

ahead and take our break. Let's -- we can take a 

little longer than the 15 minutes, maybe about 20 

minutes or so, then we'll reconvene. Thank you. 

(Whereupon, a recess was taken.) 

SITE PROFILE STATUS AND ROLL-OUT
 

DR. ZIEMER: We can proceed. The next item on our agenda is 

site profile status, and the -- I'm going to sort of 

say pinch-hitter, but he's very well qualified, Stu 

Hinnefeld, who works with Jim Neton on these activities 

from NIOSH -- and Stu, we're glad to have you here 

today, and Stu will present the site profile status and 

roll-out. 

MR. HINNEFELD: (Off microphone) Thank you. 

(Pause) 

MR. HINNEFELD: So that's it? Okay, sorry. I am really 

substituting for Jim Neton today. He was unable to 

travel this week and so I'm here in his stead, and I'm 

here to present sort of an update on the presentation 

that he presented at the last meeting about site 

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profile status and the progress that we're making on 

preparing the site profiles for quite a number of 

sites, actually. 

Sort of recapping the information that Jim presented in St. 

Louis, and also presenting for anyone who hasn't 

previously seen this or heard about this, site profiles 

are documents that are used by dose reconstructors to 

provide consistent interpretation of the information 

provided from the various DOE sites so we have a 

consistent understanding of what the bioassay data 

means, what their bioassay or what their external 

monitoring technology was, and that allows us to 

provide consistent dose reconstructions for a 

particular site. Each particular profile will address 

one site and one -- perhaps one particular type of 

exposure -- well, actually each document will. Several 

documents will be rolled into one site profile. It 

helps us to minimize individualized interpretation. In 

other words, we can have a consistent set of rules for 

interpreting the data. And it's used as a handbook by 

the dose reconstructors to provide -- to guide them in 

their work. And they're intended to be dynamic. As we 

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learn more about various sites and their approaches and 

their technologies, then we may in fact modify the 

information in the profiles. 

We are publishing our completed profiles, including the 

individual pieces of profiles, which we call Technical 

Basis Documents, as they're approved, on our web page. 

There is a little bit of a administrative process that 

happens after one is initially approved. There's a 

little time lag between the approval and appearing on 

the web page, but they're all being placed there. 

We're encouraging comments on these, and if anyone 

feels compelled to comment on the -- either the content 

or the proposed application of these site profiles, 

those comments could be submitted to the NIOSH docket, 

and there is a specific docket established for each of 

the approved documents. So again, if you go look at 

them on the web site, it's fairly apparent there's a 

link to -- to what has been -- what has been provided 

to the docket for that -- for that particular document. 

We are arranging to present the completed documents as 

they're being completed to union representatives and 

other interested parties in the vicinity of the 

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affected site. One of those briefings has actually 

been done since the St. Louis meeting. It was done in 

November at the Savannah River Site, and the next one 

is scheduled for Hanford in January. 

And there's information about the team members for the teams 

of consultants who compiled these initial versions of 

the profiles on our ORAU -- our contractor's web site. 

Now in order to contact the docket or submit comments, here 

are the ways that you can contact the NIOSH docket 

office. Written hard copy comments can be sent by mail 

to the address here. We have telephone and FAX numbers 

and e-mail that then provides comment to our docket 

office, and we'll know it is a comment to the docket by 

using that e-mail address. 

I might mention that when I was looking at my printed -- the 

printed copies of my slides, there are a number of 

spaces that found their way into the slides that don't 

appear on the slides themselves. And not being very 

good at this particular software, I apparently wasn't 

able to get them all out of there, so I apologize for 

the printed copies of the handout. 

Our latest status on the site profile status, this again is 

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essentially unchanged from the St. Louis meeting. 

There are 15 facilities we are working on at the same 

time. We expect to complete them by the end of the 

calendar year, and that's getting close. There are 

very, very many documents that are -- have been 

reviewed and are in comment resolution and are very 

close to being approved. And I did not go back and 

update the percentage of claims, but it's our 

expectation that these documents will cover very close 

to 77 percent, or something close to that number, of 

the total number of claims. In other words, the total 

number of claims we've received we have to do dose 

reconstructions from, some 77 percent of them came from 

this first 15 or so DOE facilities we are now working 

on. 

And in addition, since the St. Louis meeting or the last 

Board meeting, we have completed a couple of complexwide approaches for processing dose reconstructions. 

One is for DOE facilities and one is for AWE 

facilities. These are somewhat limited in their 

applicability. They obviously can't be applied to all 

DOE claims or all AWE claims, but there is a set of --

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a set of claims that do lend themselves to a complexwide approach for dose reconstruction, and I'll speak 

more about that in a little while. 

Site profile status, this was as of November 24th, which was 

when the -- I had to complete the preparation for the 

presentation. You can see two of the larger DOE sites, 

Savannah River Site and Hanford site, those site 

profiles are complete. And then for several other 

sites there are either one or two pieces of what I call 

here as a five-piece site profile. There are about 

five Technical Basis Documents in each site profile, 

and then there is a sixth section called an 

introduction, so I don't really count the sixth as one 

of the research-oriented pieces of the document, so I 

entered these as five. 

After this slide was prepared, a third Technical Basis 

Document from Y-12 plant was approved, as well, so 

that's the change as of late last week from this slide. 

And you also note down here we've completed a DOE 

complex-wide approach. 

For AWE sites, I believe this is the same list that was 

available at the last meeting, except for the addition 

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of the complex-wide uranium AWE facilities. 

Since we're in Nevada, in the vicinity of the Nevada Test 

Site, I researched where we were on the sections of the 

Nevada Test Site profile, the various Technical Basis 

Documents that comprise that document. The profile 

initially will consist -- here I go back to the six 

sections, that sixth section being the introduction, 

and then the other five sections are site description, 

what we call occupational medical exposure or X-rays 

received as a condition of employment like during an 

annual physical, internal exposures, environmental 

exposures -- those are all fairly far along and in 

review and comment resolution. The external dosimetry 

section is yet to get into the comment resolution 

stage. It's in our contractor's review stage. And 

then of course the introductory section, which is sort 

of just a summation of the information of the other 

five. 

Okay, the -- I want to spend a little time describing the 

complex-wide DOE technical basis. We also did a 

complex-wide AWE technical basis for a limited set of 

atomics weapons employers that met certain conditions. 

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First of all, they had to -- their AWE work had to be 

only with uranium. If there were any other 

radionuclides associated with their AWE work, then they 

would -- that -- that particular site could not be --

claims could not be processed from that -- from that 

site through the complex-wide approach. They typically 

would expect to have a fairly limited scope of AWE 

work, not a site that did -- cranked out tons and tons 

of uranium years after years after year. And so it --

the complex-wide AWE approach takes some very 

conservative, in our terminology -- in other words, 

very high potential exposures and essentially says even 

under these conditions for this certain set of cancers, 

it looks like these -- these claims won't be 

compensable even under these worst-case conditions and 

therefore it allows some processing of some AWE sites 

claims. 

For the complex-wide -- the complex-wide process is what we 

refer to as an efficiency process which follows from 

the regulations statement that dose reconstructions 

done under worst-case assumptions, and if you do a dose 

reconstruction under worst-case assumptions and it's 

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clear that the probability of causation would exceed 50 

percent, then in those cases you have -- those cases 

can be considered complete. No additional research 

will change the probability of causation determination 

-- or if additional research would only cause the 

probability of causation to go lower -- and therefore 

there is no need to pursue and research in greater 

depth this particular dose reconstruction. So with 

that in mind, there are -- there is a population of 

claims that it would appear would fall into the 

category where certain worst-case assumptions can be 

made. And even if those worst-case assumptions turned 

out to be true, which in many cases they seem almost 

incredible, that even if they were true that this --

this -- the probability of causation on this case -- on 

this claim will not rise to the 50 percent level and 

therefore these worst-case assumptions can be used in 

application to these various claims in order to 

complete the dose reconstructions and provide answers 

to claimants who have been waiting quite some time for 

their answer to their compensation claim. 

So that was a brief discussion of the purpose of the 

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complex-wide AWE -- or complex-wide DOE technical basis 

approach. And it's structured in four documents that 

are called Technical Information Bulletins. They 

address the four major types of exposure that you would 

find in a site profile. The ones that would not be 

described are facility and processes, which is one of 

the five -- five topics in a full site profile, and 

then the introductory section, which is the sixth 

section of a site profile. 

So these are the documents that comprise it. These are the 

first two about internal dose estimates; external dose 

estimates -- you'll notice this is for 

thermoluminescent dosimeters; occupationally-related 

diagnostic X-rays; and occupational doses from elevated 

ambient levels of external radiation, which we 

oftentimes call environmental or occupational 

environmental dose. 

So describing briefly the approaches that are followed on 

this -- in this particular regimen for dose 

reconstruction, first there is a case selection 

criteria that you limit the applicability of this, 

first of all, to more recent employment. It wouldn't 

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be appropriate to use a complex-wide overestimates 

because we've made certain assumptions about -- in our 

process here that would apply to more recent times, say 

from 1970 or 1980 forward, but would not necessarily 

apply to very early work. So the applicability of the 

complex-wide regimen is really limited to more recent 

employment. 

We apply maximizing factors to recorded doses and missed 

doses in order to provide confidence that we really 

have captured the worst case that this person may have 

been exposed to. Use a maximum credible undetected 

intake or a implausible undiscovered intake, depending 

upon the terminology you want to use, to evaluate a 

worst-case assumption for an internal dose. And then 

we choose parameters that maximize POC both by 

maximizing the dose and by the selection of the 

radiation types and photon energy types. 

(Pause) 

Okay, so for a little more information about the approaches 

that are taken here in terms of the maximizing doses 

and maximizing probability of causations, I made a few 

notes to go through the various approaches to kind of 

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describe what was done in the various Technical 

Information Bulletins to describe these -- this 

maximizing approach. 

For the internal dose assessment component, first of all, 

the employment has to be from a DOE site or a national 

laboratory that had an established radiation control 

program. It certainly wouldn't be appropriate to do 

this with -- this approach with an AWE site which had a 

much more limited radiation protection program because 

there's certain assumptions about what could or 

couldn't be seen at the time of employment. So the 

hire date for all these claims must be 1970 or later, 

and for some applications at some sites, 1970 is also a 

little early and so those cases can only start if the 

employment -- dose can only be done under this regimen 

if the employment started later than that. 

For internal dose assessment, the claims must involve a 

cancer of an organ or a tissue that does not 

concentrate the radioactive materials that the person 

might have been exposed to. The cancer causation or 

the dose to an organ from internal exposure depends 

quite a lot on whether that organ concentrates the 

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radioactive material or not, and if it doesn't, the 

internal doses tend to be relatively minor compared to 

organs where it does -- where the material does 

concentrate. So this approach can only be used for 

those organs that don't concentrate the radioactive 

material. 

The claims should involve people who either weren't 

monitored for internal exposure or who were monitored 

for internal exposure and had no positive bioassay 

result. And they should be for people whose jobs 

appear to be -- have an unlikely potential for 

significant internal exposure. So we're selecting a 

certain population of claims where we're liable to have 

low external -- low internal exposures -- internal 

exposures. 

Okay, the maximum or the -- the implausible undiscovered 

intake is based on the control concept of maximum 

permissible body burden, which Mr. Andrade referred to 

earlier, because that's the way the standards were 

written in the 70's and 80's, and it essentially -- the 

worst case assumption for the internal exposure is that 

the energy employee was exposed to a -- an intake that 

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would cause a significant fraction of the maximum 

permissible body burden for an entire list of 

radionuclides on his first day of employment during his 

first year of employment, and that based upon the 

selection of the case, that this had to be from a case 

with a radiation protection program. Our belief is 

that the radiation protection program would not miss 

that sort of an intake, so the maximum credible intake 

is developed in that way. It is -- the most soluble 

form of the radionuclide is chosen for the dose 

reconstruction because that will provide the highest 

dose for these non-metabolic or non-concentrating 

organs. And the actual intake is several-fold times 

the maximum permissible body burden that was in use at 

the time because of the rapid clearance from the shortlived components -- or short-lived compartments in the 

model. 

There are actually two lists of radionuclides that are used 

in this postulated intake. One is for sites with 

reactors and one is for sites without reactors. In 

addition, for uranium sites the ten percent maximum 

permissible body burden provided really fairly low 

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chronic exposure could -- over an employment period 

could achieve ten percent of maximum permissible body 

burden, which interestingly enough doesn't seem to be 

the case in very many of the other radionuclides, so 

the uranium number was sort of artificially inflated, 

so the postulated uranium intake is quite a lot larger 

than -- than it would be based on the original 

calculation method in order to demonstrate that this 

would be quite a large chronic exposure over a long 

period of time, and it would still have to have been 

missed by this radiation protection program. So those 

are the key features of the internal dose assessment 

approach. 

The elevated ambient level of external radiation approach or 

the environmental occupational dose approach is based 

on a review of environmental monitoring reports, as 

well as some of the site-specific research that's going 

into the preparation of the site-specific Technical 

Basis Documents. And what we can find from the review 

of the environmental monitoring reports is from 1980 

on, environmental releases were just not really all 

that big that they would be causing measured --

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measurable radiation exposures to a radiation 

monitoring device. From 1970 and 1980 in certain cases 

at certain sites, from our research, it appears to be 

the same, as well. And another aspect of this -- this 

particular component of dose is it's appropriate to add 

this dose to a dose reconstruction only when this dose 

is not measured by the person's personal monitoring 

program. So the person is wearing his dosimetry device 

and is exposed to this ambient elevated radiation level 

while he's at work, his dosimetry device will record 

that dose. The only reason -- and so it would be in 

his dose record, unless there was a control dosimeter 

that was used for a background subtraction that was 

located in a similar area. So if the control dosimeter 

was irradiated to this elevated level, as well, and if 

in fact the site was using that control dosimeter as a 

background subtraction on their personnel dosimeter, 

then that excess ambient dose would be subtracted off. 

And so from our research we found certainly at some of 

the bigger sites where we're further along in our 

research that the releases were getting quite small in 

the 70's and the dosimetry practices were such that 

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those -- that inappropriate control subtraction --

background subtraction was in place. And so we should 

be able to identify additional time frames in the 70's 

to use these -- we think for most of the 70's, 

probably. 

The medical occupational exposure was established based upon 

an evaluation of literature searches of exposure 

techniques and resulting exposures. Over history 

various studies were done at various times. The 

numbers -- there's a particular table of numbers that 

are used for organ doses like -- that would likely 

result from exposures before 1970, another table for 

1970 to 1985 and then another table from 1985 forward. 

These generally reflect the improvement in the 

understanding of the role of filtration, columnation* 

and technique factors and the general improvement that 

can be seen in these various scientific reports that 

were written over time to describe medical dose re-- or 

the medical exposures. 

Since the remainder of these types of radiation exposure can 

really only go from 1970 and forward, the pre-1970 

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wide, but they may be used to facilitate the 

preparation of other medical profile information later 

on when we can't find specific information on a given 

site going back before 1970. 

Finally, for the external exposures, we again have case 

selection of cases where the radiation exposure appears 

to be relatively low and the cancer is in a location 

that is not -- does not have a particularly high risk 

factor associated with radiation exposure. So we go in 

by selecting cases that look as if they have a low 

chance for exceeding the 50 percent probability 

threshold, select those cases and the external 

dosimetry must be done by thermoluminescent dosimetry 

rather than film. And the person's -- should have no 

neutron exposures. He should either be unmonitored for 

neutron exposure or he should not have a measured 

neutron exposure, and he should have a job that would 

make it look like he probably wasn't exposed to 

neutrons except maybe incidentally on occasion, but no 

appreciable neutron exposure. 

So in this approach we apply an overestimating conversion 

factor to -- and the purpose of that is to provide an 

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upper bound for the uncertainties associated with some 

of the things that were going on in dosimetry 

technology. For instance, dosimeters respond to 

different kinds of radiations and different kinds of 

energies in different fashions. Calibration methods 

sometimes varied from (Inaudible) calibrations to 

(Inaudible) calibrations. Workplace radiation fields 

could be mixed, fields -- not nice clean AP fields like 

you see in the work -- in calibration facility, and 

various facilities might have different administrative 

practices for when you record a dose and when you write 

down a zero and things like that. 

So the overestimating correction factor is developed from 

really two -- two major components. One is a combined 

uncertainty associated with geometry and calibration, 

uncertainties associated with measurement at the time. 

And an upper bound on the uncertainty that was 

probably being experienced by these sites that were 

monitoring with TLDs in the 1970's and early 80's. And 

that's a pretty -- that's established in the Technical 

Information Bulletin as being about a number of 1.8, 

and then there's a maximum organ dose correction factor 

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to convert this -- this dose number, the recorded dose 

number as adjusted to the dose to the organ in 

question, and that's just universally chosen with this 

-- with this approach to be a maximizing 1.1, which is 

actually higher than any of the DCS for this type of 

radiation and this -- this dose conversion factor. So 

those two maximizing values, when they're combined 

together, give a -- conveniently give a number of about 

two, so the consistent or overestimating correction 

factor is a factor of two applied to the recorded dose 

from these various sites for these selected cases in 

order to compensate for the uncertainties that may be 

there, provide an upper bound for what their exposure 

may truly have been. And then from missed dose 

standpoint, since the person quite likely wore some 

dosimeters that read zero, the missed dose concept or 

missed dose approach on this maximizing approach is 

just to generate a missed dose as if you wore 12 

dosimeters in a year and the limit of detection was 30 

and they were all zeroes, and then the -- and apply 

that dose correction factor again, as well, so double 

that number as well to arrive at a -- a missed dose for 

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these approaches. And the -- this is then applied in a 

-- in the lognormal distribution technique that's 

described in our implementation guide, the limit of 

detection divided by two times N as the geometric mean 

of a lognormal standard deviation. 

So those were some of the more -- some of the more graphic 

details or bloody details of the approach that was 

using -- that we're using on this complex-wide 

approach. Again, this is for a -- for a limited set of 

claims, and it's to facilitate our ability to provide 

more timely answers to claimants who have filed a claim 

and they deserve an answer to their claim. 

We also recognize that much of the profile work so far has 

been done from a particular point of view, not so much 

from the affected employee point of view, so the -- at 

the -- this was pointed out at the St. Louis meeting, 

and so we are engaged in processes to identify 

populations of workers, whether they be labor --

represented by labor unions or whether they be other 

affected workers, to provide input to us in the 

preparation of Technical Basis Documents or for 

documents that are nearing completion; after completion 

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of the Technical Basis Documents, to provide any 

comments on what was prepared to see if we need to 

provide additional information, modify what was placed 

there. 

I mentioned earlier that there was a meeting held in 

November at Savannah River. We also have one scheduled 

for Hanford in January. We've established a docket on 

our web page for each of the Technical Basis Documents 

so that any comments made on that Technical Basis 

Document will be viewable there just as easily as the 

Technical Basis Document is viewable. And then we are 

looking into other information-gathering approaches. 

We have an obligation to provide a plan for providing worker 

input into Technical Basis Documents, following the 

Board's recommendation at the last meeting, and while 

we've not finalized that plan, some of the components 

of the plan will follow along these bullets that I have 

here on the -- on the screen. 

I'll be glad to entertain any questions or comments. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Stu. Let me ask if you or one of 

the staff can tell us what the response was to the 

November 11th meeting at Savannah River in terms of 

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input from people on the site. 

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I only know what Jim -- I only know 

what Jim told me. Jim has heard a couple comments that 

it was very well-done and thanks for coming and gee, we 

really are glad to hear that. And then there have been 

other comments made in other avenue -- agendas that 

really wasn't what we needed, that wasn't what was 

intended. So I don't know whether different attendees 

came away with different views or how that came about, 

but Jim certainly did at the -- at -- my understanding 

is at the meeting itself, at the end of the meeting, 

the participants who spoke were appreciative and 

thought that it had been -- been done pretty well. 

DR. ZIEMER: You have some idea of what the level of turnout 

was for that meeting? 

MR. HINNEFELD: Well, that was not a public meeting. It was 

a meeting with labor --

DR. ZIEMER: Oh --

MR. HINNEFELD: -- certain labor officials --

DR. ZIEMER: -- okay, gotcha. Gotcha. 

MR. HINNEFELD: -- and there were eight or ten, I think, 

something like that. 

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DR. ZIEMER: Individuals that had been identified as contact 

points --

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. 

MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: Jim? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. I think actually someone -- one of the 

labor officials that was at that meeting will be 

speaking in the public comment period, so we may get 

some additional feedback on that -- on that meeting --

time. 

I would like to thank Larry and staff for going forward with 

a plan, and I understand that it's being worked out 

still. But appreciate making the effort and setting up 

these meetings 'cause I think they will be -- be 

helpful and I would hope they'd also include some way 

which is admittedly more difficult to deal with some of 

these -- particularly the AWE sites where sort of the 

workplace is closed or dispersed and how do you reach 

out to -- to people, but some sort of a briefing for 

claimants or something I think might be -- be helpful 

for -- so people understand what's going on with this 

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process. 

I've got a number of questions, but -- and some of these may 

be more appropriately dealt with later on in our 

meeting, but I think the entire Advisory Board did 

receive an e-mail from a person regarding a conflict of 

interest issue on these site profiles at the Rocky 

Flats site profile, and I don't know -- you want to 

take that up later or what the plan --

DR. ZIEMER: I received an e-mail myself a day or two ago. 

I don't always check my e-mail every day, but I think I 

got it Friday. I think it came from -- perhaps from 

Terry Berry --

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, last Thursday is when I -- date off of 

mine. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- relating or raising an issue that I think is 

what you're referring to. And perhaps -- I don't know 

if this is the time to look at that, but perhaps that 

can be addressed at -- that as a starting point by 

staff. Have you -- you've seen either the -- perhaps 

the staff has not seen the e-mail, but has had some I 

think contact on that issue, have you not? 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yes. 

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DR. ZIEMER: And you want to address that now? 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: And maybe explain for everyone what the issue 

is and how it's been addressed. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yes, Ms. Berry wrote me an e-mail before she 

sent the one to the Board. I have not seen the one she 

delivered to the Board yet. But the issue essentially 

is is that an individual on the ORAU team who is 

working on the site profile for Rocky Flats, prior to 

the genesis of this whole program, evidently provided 

some testimony in a litigation on her husband's claim 

and so we're aware now of this. It's actually -- we 

became aware of it once we had the disclosure up on the 

web site that this particular individual from ORAU had 

performed in this regard. So we at the Department are 

now looking into this and evaluating what needs to be 

done in this regard. 

We do take this very seriously and we had another instance 

in -- last meeting in Cincinnati -- or in St. Louis 

where we had a -- another situation called to our 

attention which was slightly different in that a claim 

undergoing appeal process or in the courts, at least, 

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was -- there was some testimony being provided against 

the claimant from a principal of one of the firms that 

our ORAU team subcontracts with, and that particular 

individual was not serving on any site profile 

development or dose reconstruction. But we have worked 

with the ORAU team and that particular subcontractor is 

being -- will be released. They will no longer be 

working on our site profiles or dose reconstruction 

processes. 

So that addresses both of those that have been brought to 

our attention. We're still working on this latest one 

and how we're going to deal with that. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much. Jim, did you have a 

follow-up? 

DR. MELIUS: I have a number of questions, but just as a 

follow-up to that particular point, I would just hope 

as you're dealing with these issues that you're also 

trying to evaluate other sub -- subcontractors, I guess 

they would be called, that might have similar problems 

so that there's some sort of a policy or something 

being developed so we don't have to sort of constantly 

deal with the individual situations. I know it's 

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difficult and hard to -- to know when you're somewhat, 

you know, dependent on what information is provided to 

you or provided to ORAU and then on to you, but I mean 

some sort of over -- communication of other 

subcontractors or something to just make sure that this 

-- try to avoid this as much as possible I think would 

be helpful. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Absolutely, that is part of the review that's 

underway right now and discussions that are being held 

and what type of contract language do we need to have 

in place. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. Yeah. My next question is also sort of 

procedural, but on Friday I received a FAX of a letter 

to you, Paul, from Congressman -- Congressman Quinn, 

Congresswoman Slaughter and Congressman Reynolds from 

western New York regarding -- or asking the Board to do 

-- review the site profile for the Bethelehem Steel 

site and for raising a number of particular questions 

to -- to address. And this may be more appropriate for 

us to take up tomorrow, but I just didn't know if 

everybody else was aware of it on the Board or if we'd 

received this or --

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DR. ZIEMER: I don't know the answer to that. I just myself 

got a copy of that before I left for the meeting here, 

actually studied it on the -- on the plane and I need 

to discuss that I think also with the Department and 

review the related issues to how that particular letter 

might be handled. But I have no knowledge of whether 

other Board members received copies of that letter. 

DR. MELIUS: Okay. Could we make copies then for everybody 

on the Board? 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, I'll make --

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- a copy available to Cori and make sure the 

Board has copies of that, that --

DR. MELIUS: I've got that with me, so --

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. 

DR. MELIUS: -- that's fine. I just didn't know what 

happened with that. 

The issue on these site profiles that we were just briefed 

on, I'm a little -- still a little bit puzzled, I 

guess, as -- or unsure of exactly what the process is 

now. Will we -- we go back a few years when we first 

started the advisory committee and we're doing the 

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original set of regulations and briefings and so forth 

-- presented sort of where NIOSH was at that point in 

time with this program of doing dose reconstructions. 

We had a number of sort of technical documents that 

were being developed. And then we -- you moved along 

and really got the program going, now we've gone --

we've sort of changed that original approach. We have 

the site profile process which originally was -- at 

least as I remember it, was going to be at the end of 

the process. You'd compile that from individual dose 

reconstructions. And now that -- now we're doing it up 

front and using it as a -- you've described it as a 

handbook for the people doing the dose reconstructions. 

And it would certainly be helpful for me and maybe 

other Board members -- I'd be curious how others feel -

- to understand a little bit how your -- how you're 

using these as a handbook, maybe taking Savannah River 

or one of the other completed ones and as you've gone 

through a number of individual dose reconstructions 

using that, providing with -- us with a briefing at the 

next meeting on how you are, you know, using that with 

some examples and so forth. I think --

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MR. ELLIOTT: Okay. 

DR. MELIUS: I think the last time Jim talked about this, 

you really hadn't completed enough to do these --

particularly for the more complicated sites, like 

Savannah River. I think for Bethlehem Steel and some 

of those, it's more -- more straightforward, but for 

Savannah River and the other sites, it's a -- more 

complicated and it certainly would help me to 

understand what you're doing and for us as part of our 

review of the program to see how you're doing that, I 

think it would be useful to do. 

And secondarily, as part of that, as I recall, when we 

originally talked about dose reconstructions and yeah, 

you were going to be developing policies over time, I 

guess I would see some of these -- both the site 

profiles, but also these DOE-wide -- industry-wide 

documents, your guidance doc-- you're developing as 

being sort of Technical Basis Documents that are part 

of this process that we'd expect to be developed as you 

go along. And when we originally started, we talked 

about the Board reviewing these or sort of having a 

review process. And I think we as a Board sort of have 

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to decide -- and you at NIOSH, have to decide how we're 

going to do this. Some of the early documents got peer 

review, outside technical peer review. Are we now 

relying on our -- our contractor to do the technical 

review on these or is the Board supposed to be doing 

the review of these, approving these? You know, sort 

of what is the process going to be? I think, you know, 

your briefing today is helpful and I appreciate it, but 

it's not really us reviewing these and --

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

DR. MELIUS: -- in detail and don't pretend to, and I think 

we sort of have to come to grips with how that's going 

to go forward 'cause we have a lot of -- lot of your 

work that figure -- lot -- what you're doing that we 

just sort of -- we're blinded to. We -- we haven't had 

time -- and understandably. I mean you've been, you 

know, trying to get things done, so I don't think it's 

anybody's sort of fault or placing blame, but I do 

think that we as a Board have to sort of look at how 

we're reviewing -- and particularly as we come into 

doing individual dose reconstruction reviews, we don't 

want to be in the position of, at a later point in 

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time, saying well, gee, this -- this particular overall 

technical document was wrong or led to serious 

problems. Now I'm not saying that's going to happen, 

but I do think we have to talk about that and come up 

with some way of -- systematic way of approaching this 

and some of that's I think a better understanding from 

you. And maybe not at this meeting, but maybe at this 

next meeting of sort of what -- what are the documents 

you see being developed, what's changed, what's -- what 

kind of documents are -- are sort of just procedural, 

what requires sort of a technical review, then how do 

we get that technical review done? 

DR. ZIEMER: Let me ask for other Board members to also 

maybe weigh in on those comments. While you're 

thinking about your responses, let me also point out 

that one of the things that's included in -- at least 

at the front end of our audit process is to ask our 

contractor, as they do the various types of audits of 

dose reconstructions, is in a sense a kind of audit of 

the usefulness of the site profiles insofar as those 

assist in the dose reconstruction. So we do -- or I 

think we're looking toward having in place something 

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that will help us do a kind of evaluation because I 

think the process, if it works properly, should point 

out to us strengths or weaknesses on site profiles, 

either generically or individually, as the case may be. 

I don't recall us -- well, in terms of our charter, we're 

not required a priori to approve site profiles. On the 

other hand, the Board itself may decide that it wants 

to look at them in some fashion in the audit process as 

site profiles, or address particular ones. But I don't 

believe our charter calls for us, in advance, to 

approve site profiles. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I think you're right, Paul. But I do 

think -- well, our charter does calls for review 

individual dose reconstructions --

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

DR. MELIUS: -- to the extent --

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

DR. MELIUS: -- they're used there. We also, I think, when 

we approved the original set of regulations that guided 

the dose reconstruction process, we talked about the 

Board advising NIOSH on technical issues --

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

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DR. MELIUS: -- that would develop over time. 

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

DR. MELIUS: Now some of these were technical changes to 

what was originally approved, some of these would be 

sort of further developments. And I just think we have 

to sort of systematize in some way -- part of my 

question comes from sort of what is the full scope 

going to be of our dose reconstruction review contract 

that's out there. Is it going to review every 

procedure? Is it -- you know, do we select? Is it 

every so -- site profile or -- or not, and I -- and 

then we get Congressional letters asking --

DR. ZIEMER: Well --

DR. MELIUS: -- about that, too, and that makes --

DR. ZIEMER: -- keep in mind, too, that an audit process --

I have to keep stressing this, to myself and to the 

Board and others -- that an audit process is not 100 

percent review of everything that's done. In fact, our 

audit process calls for us to review something like two 

and a half percent of the dose reconstructions. 

Now it's very true that many of those dose reconstructions 

will have used the same site profile for at least part 

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of the process of reconstructing dose, so it's hard to 

imagine that in some form or another we won't in fact 

be able to evaluate those. But I'm not -- I'm not 

speaking against systemizing this in some additional 

way, but simply reminding us that we will in fact have 

opportunity to address that. 

I do appreciate learning about what you might call the sitewise (sic) things because there are certain issues that 

lend themselves to that kind of analysis. Some of 

those things, whether they're sort of site-wide or more 

localized, I think will always be subject to 

interpretation of validity of assumptions. Let's take, 

for example, the medical exposure of workers. You will 

make assumptions I think based on practice as to what 

film speeds are used, what beam filtrations are used, 

what columnation is used -- all of which affect patient 

dose to the organ being examined, as well as dose to 

other organs from either scatter or a practice which in 

early days was very common and that was to remove the 

columnation because the lights were not aligned with 

the true X-ray beam and the way you get -- solve that 

easily is rather than get the X-ray machine fixed, you 

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just pull out the columnator*. And if your beam is 

wide enough, you'll sure hit the organ you're 

interested in, and every other organ, as well. 

And I don't know that -- I guess, you know, what assumptions 

are made? Do you make the worst -- a worst-case 

assumption in that situation is that there's no 

columnation. 

MR. HINNEFELD: As a matter of fact, I think the early --

very earliest numbers -- table numbers in the medical 

do make that assumption. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 'Cause it was a very common practice. 

Okay. But those are the kind of issues that I -- I 

think a sampling can help us have a level of confidence 

that -- you know, we may not have to sample every 

assumption made, but if you start sampling and it looks 

like the right thing's being done, then that gives you 

a level of confidence. 

MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. 

DR. ZIEMER: Other -- I don't mean to monopolize this. 

Tony? 

DR. ANDRADE: Yes, I'd like to just comment that, first of 

all, we should also remind ourselves that we are not --

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we're not an expert board. We are an advisory board, 

so I'm not sure to what extent we should really look at 

all of the technical details of even any one of these 

site profiles. 

Two is that I do recall that several meetings ago it was 

announced that site profiles would be developed and 

that they would be used in a very limited sense. And 

as was presented today, you got a feeling for the 

limitations that are imposed on their applicability. 

For example, the age of the employee, the time during 

which they were working, some of the assumptions made. 

And I can just imagine the type of filtration or 

efficiency that you're gaining from these for the types 

of employees that probably would never achieve a POC of 

50 percent. And we're talking about people that 

perhaps handled the bioassay samples and took them back 

and forth to the laboratory, administrative assistants 

that worked nearby to say neutron-generating 

operations, those sorts of employees in which doses 

themselves were probably extremely, extremely low. So 

given all those factors -- oh, and along with the fact 

that we do have a task order out that is supposed to 

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direct a subcontractor to us to look at -- especially 

site profiles on top of individual dose reconstruction, 

I really feel that any further let's say work added to 

the Board's schedule would at this point just be 

relatively non-value added and that, insofar as this 

Board member is concerned, I am quite satisfied with 

the monthly or however often we meet updates like the 

one that was just presented that gives me a feeling for 

how these are being used, what sort of details are 

going into them and the types of analyses and 

assumptions being made within them. That's all. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Let's -- Mark and then Jim. 

MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, I just -- I do agree with one part of 

what -- when Tony said that we do have a task order 

out, and the contractor's going to review the site 

profiles, even though we're not -- and just a reminder 

that the contractor's work is -- is the Board's work. 

I mean the contractor's working for the Board, so we 

are going to be reviewing site profiles, and I think 

that's where we're going to get into the meat of it. 

I do have a couple of comments about the presentation, 

though, just -- some of which I've probably said 

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before. But I -- you know I still -- in your second 

slide, I see things like limited scope, and I do 

understand, you know, from your presentation what you 

meant by that. But the fear I still have with some of 

what I've seen so far is -- is the idea of -- there are 

some sites where I think a better understanding of 

operational details is going to give a very different 

picture of potential worst-case doses. And if we just 

skim the surface with a limited-scope site profile --

and I'm not saying -- I mean I know it's a lot of work 

to do these things, too, but we could easily miss, you 

know, some very -- some operations which have very 

different exposures than the general building, for 

instance, and I've found that in some of the work that 

I've done. And it may not affect a lot of the workers 

on the site, but it may turn out to be several of the 

claimants. So you know, without going to that level of 

detail, I fear that we may miss some of that and 

underestimate worst-case doses for a certain fraction 

of people. That's one thing. 

The other question I -- this is more of a -- go as a 

statement. The other question I had was later in the 

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presentation you talked about the missed dose with the 

external exposures. I didn't really hear you address 

unmonitored dose, and I know that's come up again and 

again during public comments, we've heard it over the 

years from DOE hearings and things like that. Some 

employees report anecdotal reports that their badges 

were tampered with, they weren't badged for certain 

high level operations. How are -- how are you handling 

potential unmonitored exposures or -- in your -- in 

your... 

MR. HINNEFELD: I guess on the face of it, without looking 

at a specific instance of a specific case and a 

specific set of claims, I would say that claims of that 

nature would -- I guess might tend to make it more 

difficult to apply a complex-wide standard approach. 

And so it would fall into sort of the case selection 

portion of what's going through this process. I mean 

you kind of have to -- I don't know that I can say 

universally, whoever says -- you know, makes that claim 

that we want to run through that process, I don't -- I 

won't stand here and make that claim, but I think it 

would affect -- you know, those kinds of issues would 

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affect the case selection for what might go through 

this. 

MR. GRIFFON: Okay. 

DR. ZIEMER: Jim. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. Just in response to what Tony was 

saying, I'm not -- what I was suggesting wasn't 

necessarily to add to the work for the Advisory Board, 

but in addition to the -- sort of the scientific 

confidence that we have in what NIOSH is doing, I think 

it's also our credibility issues and we have to 

remember that at the end of the process when we've gone 

through -- we're not going to be able to review 

everything through our contractor -- that what we don't 

review, the credibility of that has to be defended in 

some way. 

Now if we say we've reviewed -- we may be confident by, you 

know, two percent or whatever it is of the cases, 

individual dose reconstruction reviewed that, you know, 

that's representative and that we've -- provides 

credibility to the process. But to some extent we have 

to think the same way about the site profiles, about 

these other Technical Basis Documents and I was just 

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arguing for some sort of systematic approach and that -

- and also to make sure that NIOSH wasn't expecting us 

to review -- to provide the technical review on all 

these procedures, even though it may be useful from a -

- from NIOSH's point of view from -- in terms of the 

credibility of the application of these -- these 

processes, so -- I think it's just sort of coming to 

grips with that. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Tony, another comment? 

DR. ANDRADE: Just a quick question for Mark. Do you have 

any idea on the percentage of these -- of the work in 

which we're -- in which our subcontractor's actually 

going to be looking at site profiles? 

MR. GRIFFON: I don't recall off-hand. I mean the last task 

we laid out a pretty aggressive -- I forget the 

numbers, but we have a fair -- fairly high percentage 

of the overall site profiles. I think it was four AWEs 

and eight --

DR. ZIEMER: I don't remember the numbers, but in terms of 

percent -- percent-wise, it's much higher than for 

individual cases. But that's understandable in terms 

of the fact that many -- most of the cases come from a 

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relatively small number of sites, actually. 

MR. GRIFFON: Right. 

DR. ANDRADE: Good. Thank you. 

DR. ZIEMER: Other comments or questions? Okay, thank you 

very much. Thank you, Stuart, for that update. 

 IMBA UPDATE
 

Now we're going to turn our attention to the internal dose 

issues or the -- the calculation of internal dose. The 

terminology is Integrated Modules for Bioassay 

Analysis, and we're going to get an update on that from 

David Allen of NIOSH. David. 

MR. ALLEN: Okay. Can you hear me? All right. Thank you. 

As Dr. Ziemer said, my name's Dave Allen. You've seen me 

before. It's been a while, but you have seen me 

before. And he mentioned I'm giving a presentation 

today on IMBA. And IMBA is the computer software that 

we've been using for internal dosimetry calculations. 

As Dr. Ziemer already mentioned -- as Dr. Ziemer already 

mentioned, that stands for Integrated Modules for 

Bioassay Analysis. The difference between IMBA and the 

bulk of the commercially-available software for 

internal dosimetry right now is that IMBA uses the 

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current ICRP models. Any -- most of the other 

commercially-available software uses ICRP-30 models, 

which are a generation back. 

I think it was easiest first to start with a little bit of 

history on the IMBA program, and up until the early 

90's, ICRP-30 was the current ICRP models for internal 

dosimetry. In 1994 ICRP published a new lung model for 

internal dosimetry, and that was the beginning of 

various new models, including biokinetic models. As --

this particular lung model was considerably more 

complicated than the last, and as such, while they were 

producing this model, they also produced some computer 

programs to help evaluate that model. Once the model 

was published in 1994, the people that put that 

computer program together, NRPB, went ahead and 

packaged it as a software -- they connected --

DR. ZIEMER: Identify for everyone -- I -- I'm assuming, but 

it's probably not true, that ICRP is known, but maybe 

you should identify all the acronyms as you go. 

MR. ALLEN: Okay, there's a lot of them. 

DR. ZIEMER: If you remember them all. 

MR. ALLEN: ICRP is the International Commission on 

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Radiological Protection. It's basically the worldwide 

expert on internal dosimetry, recognized expert on 

internal dosimetry, as well -- radiological protection 

in general. 

NRPB is the National Radiological Protection Board, which is 

I think semi-private/semi-government agency of Great 

Britain. Some of the people in that organization were 

involved when the ICRP committee for developing that 

lung model, and they developed computer software to 

evaluate that while it was being produced. 

Once the lung model was produced, they connected it to the 

ICRP-30 biokinetic models, which were all they had at 

the time, and packaged that software in a form known as 

LUDEP. LUDEP then is like a hybrid of two different --

your current model/old model type of thing. It was a 

DOS-based program. It was kind of clunky to run, but 

it was something that you had. 

Shortly after the lung model, ICRP then began producing new 

biokinetic models, and as part of that, these 

individuals at NRPB were also involved with that. And 

as new models came out, they produced new computational 

models or modules that would do those calculations. 

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And eventually all this was put together -- all these 

individual computational modules were put together into 

a -- one computer program, and that was known as IMBA, 

hence the Integrated part of the acronym -- Integrated 

Modules. 

The first version of IMBA that I know of was IMBA-URAN, and 

after they -- NRPB copyrighted this -- these 

computational modules, they began putting IMBA together 

in an integrated fashion. IMBA-URAN, they were 

contracted to put together something a little more 

user-friendly for the CANDU reactors. That ended up 

doing only uranium, was all that would do. It was 

pretty limited in scope, but it did put everything 

together. 

After that, near the same time, DOE contracted -- contracted 

them to put together an IMBA EXPERT version, which 

included more isotopes and a little more versatility --

quite a bit more versatility. That took some time for 

them to complete, and then during that process, we 

contracted them to put together an IMBA-NIOSH version. 

That allowed for annual doses for a limited number of 

isotopes, and gave us what we needed for this program 

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on a limited basis. Once the IMBA EXPERT was done for 

DOE, we then asked for a modification of the software 

which included all the functionality of the IMBA EXPERT 

version, all those isotopes plus some additional 

isotopes, and that was all put together into what is 

now known as the IMBA EXPERT OCAS-edition. 

Some of the features of the IMBA EXPERT edition is -- we can 

do up to ten individual intake regimes. By intake 

regime, that's -- that's a term given in IMBA, but it 

essentially is specifying the dates; the route of 

entry, whether inhalation, injection, et cetera; and 

also whether it's a chronic versus acute. That all 

together is one intake regime. You can specify up to 

ten intake regimes, so you can give somebody an acute 

intake on one day, followed by a chronic intake during 

another period of time, followed by an acute ingestion 

some other time, put it all together in one shot. So 

it's good to have a number of those when you're talking 

about a career dose. 

As I already mentioned, it can do inhalation, injection and 

ingestion. It can do -- whether -- it can do a chronic 

versus acute on any of those intake routes. The 

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solubility parameters can be specified as ICRP default 

solubility types, or you can specify individual 

parameters if you know more about the material the 

person inhaled or ingested. 

Bioassay is -- we can use whole body counts, we can use lung 

counts, urinalysis or fecal sampling. There's also a 

few other bioassay types for specific isotopes, such as 

we can use thyroid counts for iodine exposures if -- if 

we have that data, we can use that then to determine 

intakes. 

IMBA can be used to calculate the intake from that bioassay 

samples. It can be used to calculate dose from a given 

intake or the calculated intake. The dose can be 

effective dose, which is essentially a whole body dose, 

or it can calculate tissue dose -- tissue or organ. 

The dose that it calculates can be specified either 50-

year committed or, more important for us, they can be 

specified as annual doses. 

I'm going to take you through screen shots of the program. 

This -- there's not a good way to do this presentation. 

I'm going to take you through some screen shots just 

because I think it will be a little quicker than 

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letting you watch a computer program work while it's 

trying to work on the screen. 

There's a number of pop-up screens and menus in IMBA. It's 

-- gets to be a fairly complicated program, but the 

three primary screens are the -- what I call the main 

screen. That's the screen you get when you first turn 

it on. The other two main screens are -- or primary 

screens are the dose calculation screen and the 

bioassay screen. 

That's the main screen. When you first turn the program on, 

that's what you see. For the most part, this is 

somewhat administrative data for the intake. It will -

- over in this side here -- it's divided into somewhat 

four sections. Starting over here, you're allowed to 

specify the particular radioisotopes you're interested 

in, and you can specify the exact intake if that's 

where you want to start. If you want to start from 

bioassay and calculate intake, obviously you leave that 

blank and that would come about later. The bottom 

section here is simply two buttons to take you to the 

other two primary screens. 

And the top section right here, I have a little blow-up of -

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- a little clearer -- and as I said, this is somewhat 

administrative detail for the intake, all the 

information you need to put in ahead of time to start 

off with. Off to this side, you have -- you can 

specify the units you want the dose in, whether you 

want to work in sieverts, rem, et cetera. You can 

specify the units you want the activity to be in, 

whether becquerels, dpm, that sort of thing. 

And up here is time. You can specify whether you want to 

deal with dates or whether you want to deal with time 

since the intake, such as ten days, 100 days, et 

cetera. In general, when you're dealing with an 

individual's individual case, the dates are usually the 

best thing to use. If you're dealing with a 

programmatic issue, like you want to come up with an 

excretion curve, then the days are probably better, the 

time. 

This date you see here is nothing more than a reference 

date. If you're going to use time and specify the time 

since a particular date, then that reference date'll be 

the main thing. In the case over here, you see a zero 

in that time box. That means in this case it's -- this 

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one represents 1/1/1980. If I were to put a ten in 

there, it would represent 1/11/1980, that sort of 

thing. And the reason for the reference date instead 

of just time since intake is 'cause you can do more 

than one intake. Some of these intakes could be years 

apart, so you -- the program needs one reference date 

to work with. 

I mentioned on the other side you could do up to ten intake 

regimes. That's specified in this area. As you add 

more intake regimes to it, you get more tabs right 

here. Each of these tabs, once you click on them, you 

get an identical screen below here, and on this screen 

you can specify the route; you can specify the mode, 

whether it's acute or chronic; and you can specify the 

start date. If you click -- if you click on the 

chronic button, you also get another box to show up 

there to -- for the end date. As I said, somewhat 

administrative detail, but that's the -- the important 

detail, of course. 

DR. ZIEMER: Where does the solubility -- does that show up 

later? 

MR. ALLEN: Yes. 

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DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

MR. ALLEN: In fact, back to the main screen, the last 

section is down here where it says model parameters. 

There's a number of model parameters, and some of those 

will appear or disappear depending on the route of 

entry that you specified. Each of those allows you to 

change the parameters associated with that type of --

those parameters. 

I'm going to give you one screen shot -- that's the blow-up 

of the solubility. When you click on one of those 

buttons at the bottom of the main screen, you get a 

pop-up screen. In this case I clicked on absorption. 

I get this screen. It shows you a pictorial 

representation of the model, as far as the solubility 

part of it goes. It shows you the actual values that 

are going to be used, and it also has buttons to allow 

you to pick the default solubility types in this case -

- you know, F, M or S. You could also click on userdefined and then put in your own values here. 

DR. ZIEMER: What about particle sizes for inhalation, is 

that --

MR. ALLEN: That is one of those other many buttons on the 

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model parameters, and I don't have a screen shot of 

that. I didn't want to come up with all of them. And 

that again is either default -- all the other models 

have ICRP default or user-input, user-specified. You 

can see on this screen you also get an F1 value, which 

it could be specified on yet another screen, too. 

They're linked. And the help button will actually give 

you what the F1 values are for that particular isotope 

you've already selected to get to this point, and it'll 

tell you the chemical compounds associated with that --

what that's -- the default solubility type are for that 

chemical compound, what the F1 value is for that 

default solubility type and the ICRP reference where 

that value came from. And you can simply click on that 

help menu, click OK and it'll put the value in there 

for you. 

Okay. That was the main screen, and as I mentioned, there's 

two more primary screens associated with the program. 

It's somewhat backwards to do the dose one first, but 

it's the easiest one to deal with and then I'll get 

into the bioassay one. 

When you click the dose button at the bottom of the main 

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screen, you'll come up with the dose calculation 

screen. From this screen, you can start off by seeing 

off to the side -- it'll tell you the quantity -- the 

intake of -- the individual intake regimes that you're 

about to calculate dose for. In this case I've got 

three in there, and I think two of them are zeroes, so 

it's probably a bad screen shot to put up there, but 

that's what I ended up putting up. 

Over here you simply have a calculate button. Once you hit 

calculate, this will give you the effective dose from 

this -- these intakes that you have specified -- these 

ones that are listed over here. It'll also give you 

the organ dose for each intake regime, as well as the 

total of all three. And this screen you can see --

there's a slide bar. There's a lot more organs than 

there's -- you can see from this screen, but... 

These that you're seeing here, the effective dose and the 

organ doses, are all 50-year committed doses. For 

purposes of our program, that's not very useful. We 

don't use that much, but it is there and it's a great 

QA for the program itself to verify it against the ICRP 

values. 

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Up here in the corner you see a button that says calendar. 

What that button allows you to do then is get to where 

you can calculate the annual doses. You get another 

pop-up screen. 

This is the annual dose calculation screen, and what it 

allows you to do is input the start year. There's a 

pick list of 30-some organs that you can choose from. 

There is the end date, which would be the date of 

diagnosis for us. And once you have all that 

information entered in, you hit start calculate. It 

takes a little bit of time, but it'll run through the 

calculation and it'll give you the annual dose each 

year from the start year to the diagnosis date. And 

you can see from the screen, the last year it's going 

to be a partial year, from the beginning of that 

calendar year to the date of diagnosis. 

The last two buttons are down here. That allows this 

information to be copied to the clipboard or to be 

exported as an ASCII file, which makes it much easier 

to use. You can simply copy it to the clipboard, paste 

it into say Excel if you wanted to, and then you have 

all the values you want to... 

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Okay, the last primary screen is the bioassay primary 

screen, and right here are two tabs. These are keys to 

the screen. What you can see on there right now it 

says bioassay to intake, and that would allow you to 

calculate an intake from the bioassay. If you click 

the other button, the other tab here, it gives you a 

little different information here. It allows you to 

predict the bioassay measurements from a given intake. 

Sounds like a subtle difference, but it's an important 

difference. 

In this case I have urine selected here. I'm on the 

bioassay to intake screen. When I hit calculate, it's 

going to take the data that I've put in there, the 

measurement data that I've put in there, try to fit the 

data the best it can to all the intake regimes that I 

put up there as far as the intake dates, routes of 

entry, all that. It'll try to fit that data the best 

it can to that and come up with the intakes, the actual 

quantity of -- that was the intake. 

If I go this button here, I have to specify dates that I 

want it to calculate or predict what the bioassay would 

be. I click a calculate button on that screen. It 

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doesn't change the intakes at all. It simply 

calculates what a bioassay would be from those given 

intakes. 

Over here on this side I have actually three identical 

areas, though they don't look identical right now. 

Each of these areas allows you to choose a bioassay 

from a pick list -- bioassay types, such as urine, 

fecal, et cetera. It allows you to have the table or 

the graph, and each one is identical, so in this case 

I've got the table data for urine and a graph for the 

urine samples. I can see them at the same time. It 

makes life a little easier when you're working around 

with the data. If I also had lung count data, I could 

put that up there, either the table or the graph. If I 

had a number of things I could put all three graphs up 

there, however I wanted to work it out. 

Each of these screens have a little tool button. If you 

click that, you get a more detailed screen or a bigger 

-- full-page screen of those individual spots. That's 

just a little blow-up of the exact same thing I just 

showed you. I thought it might be a little easier to 

see. 

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There's the full-screen view of the table data, and you can 

see you have two different colors -- color codings. 

The green is for the prediction. That's if you want to 

go from the intake to the -- predict what the bioassay 

would be. The input in this case would be the dates 

that you're interested in. In the case of urine also, 

the collection period. 

The blue area is actual measured data. It would be a date 

that somebody was sampled, the collection period and 

the actual measured quantity. The data type, there's 

actually three options here. You can specify whether 

that's a real quantity, an actually measured quantity, 

or if it's simply a less-than. The less-than LOD 

stands for less than limit of detection. 

The third quantity I don't have on there is simply excluded. 

From time to time you might get an outlier that 

doesn't seem to make any sense, and that would allow 

the dosimetrist to select excluded for that dataset, 

and at that point the program will ignore it. It'll 

still plot it on the graph, but that's the only thing 

it'll do with it, so if you can ignore what looks like 

an outlier and then all of a sudden everything fits 

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real well with the models, then you've got a chance 

that it's -- it really was an outlier. 

The other two are semi-self-explanatory. They show you the 

measurement error and the error distribution. Your 

options there are normal or lognormal. 

It's a little better blow-up of the graph. When you click 

the tool button on a graph, then you get this blow-up. 

I've cropped a little bit of it out so you can't 

really see what's going on down there, but that is 

essentially a lot of administrative type information --

what scale you want, format for data, how many decimal 

places, that sort of thing. As far as the scale, what 

you see here are the days since that reference date 

back on the first page. Off to the side here is the 

actual measured -- or the quantity that you're trying 

to measure. In this case I think it was in picocuries 

per day for urine samples, I believe it was. 

The blue dots are the measured values, complete with the 

error bars. The black line that you see here is the 

fit that IMBA did to that -- that data, based on the 

intake regimes that you gave it. The green -- I don't 

know how well you can see that -- actually follows all 

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the way along this black line, and the green is the 

predicted bioassay. The reason you see such a 

difference here is the graphing function itself is not 

that sophisticated, and it's simply connecting dot to 

dot that the program has calculated. When you see 

something like this with the black line and it's say 

several weeks after initial intake, someone might be 

thinking it should be higher and they could be coming 

down by then. What the predicted bioassay allows you 

to do is select some dates in between there. The black 

is relying on the dates that the sample was done. The 

green, you can select dates to see what the model 

predicts to see if it is realistic. In this case, in 

between there you can see where the urine should have 

jumped way up and then been coming down by the time 

that first sample was taken, after -- so you get the 

idea of what you're saying from this intake regime, 

what you're predicting. 

The last thing I wanted to show you was I got a split screen 

here of -- back to that bioassay screen, and I wanted 

to show you the utility of graph and why a picture's 

worth 1,000 words. Off to the side here, this is a 

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graph of urinalysis for a particular individual uranium 

exposure over -- over time, various different intake 

regimes. A number of intake regimes were put in, IMBA 

calculated the values for the urinalysis and this is 

what he -- the black line versus the blue dots or how 

it fit together. It seems fairly reasonable on this. 

Down below here the blue dots are lung counts that were done 

on the person. The intakes were not determined from 

lung counts. They were determined in this case from 

urinalysis, and then the lung count data was predicted, 

and that's the green line you see up here. And you can 

see the green line doesn't seem to match the blue lines 

very well at all. It seems to be considerably higher. 

That pretty much tells the dosimetrist, you know, some 

of the assumptions are wrong somewhere. In this 

particular case, this was assumed to be a type S 

material, and IMBA then allows you to go back, change 

the solubility assumption to, in this case, type M, 

redo the same thing, and you can see there that you can 

not really tell any difference in the fit. You can fit 

urinalysis data very well with type S or type M, 

different quantities, but the intake regime was the 

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same. 

The lung count data, on the other hand, when you compared, 

all of a sudden that green line fits right through all 

the blue dots. It seems to be most realistic in this 

case to be type M type material. 

And that's pretty much it. I'm looking at a lot of stone 

faces and no questions. I know it's a dry topic --

DR. ZIEMER: I'm trying to see where the -- where are the 

data points in those two lower curves? Are they down 

near the axis? Is that what --

MR. ALLEN: Yeah, there's a row of data points right there -

-

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, I see. 

MR. ALLEN: I put the axis in that situation -- I mean I 

could have spread it out a little more, but I put the 

axis so I could get this green line on the screen. And 

then in this case, I just wanted to compare apples to 

apples. I left the axes the same. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, thank you very much. Let's open the 

floor for questions. Tony. 

DR. ANDRADE: Dave, you mentioned in one of your screens 

there that either the model predicted points below the 

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detection limit or data were entered that were below 

the detection limit. Which was which and can you 

explain that to me again? That one kind of took me by 

surprise. 

MR. ALLEN: Went by a little fast? 

DR. ANDRADE: Yeah. 

MR. ALLEN: That was measured values below the detection 

limit, so --

DR. ANDRADE: Measured values? 

MR. ALLEN: In other words -- example, somebody got a 

urinalysis and the results were less than one picocurie 

per day or some value --

DR. ANDRADE: Right. 

MR. ALLEN: -- you can put in that value and say it was less 

than. That's what the program allows you to do. 

DR. ANDRADE: But wouldn't a reasonable health physicist 

have a decision limit that's greater-than? I mean 

using classical statistics, okay, not Baysian, but 

classical, wouldn't you have a detection limit that's 

certainly somewhere way above your -- I mean a decision 

limit way above your detection limit? 

MR. ALLEN: Yes, you would. Unfortunately, a lot of cases 

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we have, there's going to be no detectable samples. 

We're stuck with a lot of less-thans. This at least 

allows us to plot them out and saying they're lessthan. If -- if there's enough detectable sample that 

we want to ignore what was less-than, we can exclude 

those with the exclude type and see how everything fit 

with what was actually detectable and make sure that's 

reasonable for that situation. There's a number of 

options that are available there. 

DR. ANDRADE: Okay. So you're artificially establishing a 

floor that's actually below your detection limit for 

your system. 

MR. ALLEN: No, actually what it's doing is it is using a 

maximum likelihood method on the fit and by 

establishing it -- the value is less than detection 

limit, it says it has to be in that range between --

somewhere in that range between zero and the detection 

limit. That way it tries not to fit it. If it's going 

to come out way above that, it's not going to try to 

predict that intake. It'll predict one that's going to 

put it down below there, but it doesn't give a lot of 

weight to it, just somewhere in that range. 

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DR. ANDRADE: Thank you. 

DR. ZIEMER: Jim and Gen. 

DR. MELIUS: Gen was first. 

DR. ROESSLER: I have a question with regard to the IMBA 

history. You mentioned that NRPB developed these 

biokinetic models using the new ICRP models in about 

1994? 

MR. ALLEN: Well, 1994 was the lung model published -- when 

the lung model was published. NRPB did play around 

with some computer models before that, and that 

accounts for some of the values in that publication. 

Those for the most part came from Allen Birchell*, who 

works for NRPB. 

DR. ROESSLER: And then you mentioned that the IMBA models 

or model was developed. Was that done by NRPB? 

MR. ALLEN: Yeah. NRPB copyrighted the calculational model 

that they use for the LUDEP and the lung model. 

DR. ROESSLER: And then -- and when -- when was that? 

MR. ALLEN: The copyrights -- the individual models I 

believe were copyrighted at various times. It's 

actually several modules, one of which is a lung 

deposition*, one is a --

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DR. ROESSLER: It's more recently, though, I guess? 

MR. ALLEN: Excuse me? 

DR. ROESSLER: More recently? 

MR. ALLEN: Probably post-'94 when it was copyrighted. And 

then as the biokinetic models were developed, they 

copyrighted new modules. 

DR. ROESSLER: Up to this time, up to your presentation, I 

was thinking that NIOSH had developed IMBA. What 

you're really doing, you're using the program developed 

by NRPB. 

MR. ALLEN: Right, what it amounts to is copyrighted 

software -- or copyrighted calculational engines, and 

we asked for the front end -- everything you see pretty 

much, we asked for that to be developed, a user 

interface. 

DR. ROESSLER: My real question is who validated the model? 

Did NIOSH do anything -- I mean I want to know if it's 

working right, and I know NRPB probably did, but I'm 

wondering what you did to -- to validate it to make 

sure that that's the model you wanted to use and that 

you're getting the right answers. 

MR. ALLEN: Right. NRPB did a lot of V&B* on it, quality 

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control, every time they develop a new model on there, 

they do a lot of quality control. Also they were 

pretty much the only thing that had any sort of 

credibility or V&B out there at the time we were 

looking for something. And when we get in a new 

version, what we've done is used the committed dose 

section of that. We can put in -- at one becquerel 

intake, use the committed dose and see if we get the 

right effective and the right organ doses according to 

NRPB publications, and that's what we're claiming to 

use is NRCP -- NCRP models -- I'll get it right -- ICRP 

models. We're claiming to use the ICRP models. The 

program with the particular input gives us the right 

output that we can tell from those publications, and 

that's -- that and maybe a little bit of more 

validations is about all we manage to do in-house, but 

we have the NRPB quality control documents, also. 

DR. ZIEMER: Jim, then Mark. 

DR. MELIUS: Well, actually Gen asked one of my questions, 

though I'm still a little bit concerned with just the -

- the validation issue. So -- so how do we know that 

this is giving you the right -- the correct answers for 

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other situations? I mean it -- assume there's been 

more to the quality control that went into developing 

this than -- than what you described. 

MR. ALLEN: NRPB has put a lot into it. What we've done inhouse is -- first thing is to -- for each isotope, we 

put in one becquerel and see if the effective dose is 

what's -- matches what's in the publications. Also see 

that the committed dose to organs matches what's in the 

publications. After that, we've determined -- we 

calculated annual dose for 50 years, put them in Excel, 

added them up and made sure that matched. So it's --

you know, annual doses at least match -- or add up to 

the 50-year committed dose. 

We've also -- using ICRP-78 where we can with the dates that 

are in 78 for bioassay, we can predict bioassay -- put 

in, you know, standard input, like a one becquerel 

intake and predict what the bioassay should be at fiveday, ten-day, 100-day, whatever's in the ICRP 

publication, and we can verify that that matches with 

the publication. And we've done a little bit of work 

matching up with -- Potter published a whole magazine 

of tables for bioassay analysis and we've done some 

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spot-checking against that. 

DR. MELIUS: Secondly is the issue of how you use it, and I 

guess I'm a little -- well, I don't -- confused or 

concerned, but at one point you mentioned that you're 

going through and when you find an outlier, you exclude 

it. 

MR. ALLEN: The option's there for the dosimetrist. 

DR. MELIUS: Okay. But is that what you -- you're actually 

doing? 'Cause I mean I --

MR. ALLEN: It can be. I mean errant bioassay samples do 

happen. There's not unusual to even get a number of 

samples, you can watch urinalysis coming down from an 

acute intake and then one of them's zero. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

MR. ALLEN: The next one seems to be following the curve. 

That zero, if you assume it's real and the computer's 

looking at it, it's going to drive that intake down to 

try to fit the data, so the dosimetrist is allowed to 

exclude that and see if the data fits better without 

that anomaly. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, but then what -- how do you take that 

into account when you're doing your actual dose 

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calculation? How do we know that your assumptions --

your assum-- that you're excluding it 'cause it's a bad 

bioassay sample versus that you're making the wrong 

assumptions because of the -- you have poor 

information? And then how does that get into --

eventually get into the IREP model as -- in terms of 

your certainty about that dose? I guess -- and I'm 

going for -- trying to get at how much, you know, 

individual, you know, (Inaudible), if ten different 

health physicists used the same data, would they all 

come up with the same, you know, calculation or --

yeah, yeah, that's --

MR. ALLEN: For internal dosimetry, no. You will get ten 

different answers. Hopefully they'll get the -- our --

our job is to make sure we get the same side of 50 

percent probability. The dose should be reasonably 

close, the intake. 

For the most part, as far as the uncertainty, at this point 

we can -- I can answer that that we've avoided it. For 

the most part we have tried to overestimate or 

underestimate bioassay. When we have data on a curve 

or data showing on a curve that's considerably higher 

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or considerably lower than that data point's indicating 

that it's definitely an overestimate or definitely an 

underestimate, therefore we can bound the intake that 

way. And that's probably going to be a big portion of 

the cases. We can bound it that way and not deal with 

the -- you know, whether it's ten percent error or 50 

percent error or whatever. 

DR. MELIUS: No, I -- I understand that part. I just get 

concerned about the ones that you can't do that on and 

where your assumptions are going to be sort of critical 

to the outcome of that case, and sort of how do we get 

consistency in doing it, I think is the -- is the 

issue. I think Tony has a... 

DR. ZIEMER: Mark and then Tony. 

MR. GRIFFON: I have a pretty straightforward one. What --

in this newest version, what are the radionuclides 

available now? I know in -- I saw a recent version and 

it had just limited radionuclides built in and I wonder 

if -- if you've got all the radionuclides you need for 

this program available now. 

MR. ALLEN: We have about -- I believe the number's 54 now 

in there. It's all the important ones you would want 

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with DOE complex and probably not every single one. 

There's always an odd case out there, especially at a 

national lab. For the most part, what's missing either 

has a short half-life or a short biological half-life, 

and we can use the 50-year committed published doses --

the person got it all in the first year and we can 

simply use that without the computer program. 

DR. ZIEMER: Tony? 

DR. ANDRADE: Dave, certainly within the laboratories we 

have ways of ensuring that the spikes and the zeroes 

are true or not true. We run blanks and we also run 

spikes, along with the real bioassay samples. And that 

is true for both alpha spectroscopy as well as for mass 

spectrometry. And I guess my question to you is do we 

pass along or do you use all of the raw data that we 

collect? Or do you use our final values? 

MR. ALLEN: We ask for the raw data and that's what we use. 

DR. ANDRADE: Okay. 

MR. ALLEN: If we can -- all the way down to counts per 

minute if that's what we can get, but that's pretty 

rare to get ahold of that. That's generally going to 

be a urinalysis result in say dpm per day or whatever 

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the appropriate unit is for that particular isotope, 

and that's what we start with. 

DR. ANDRADE: Okay. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, the issue's been brought up before here 

about the accessibility of this software for people 

that are not directly involved in the program, and I 

may be wrong, but I thought Larry or somebody was going 

to look into that issue. Am I remembering wrong? I 

don't want to put you on the spot, but -- or have we 

thought about that more or -- that whole issue? 

MR. ELLIOTT: We've already answered that. 

MR. ALLEN: I've encouraged the vendor to make a publiclyavailable version that he can sell. They are looking 

at that. They have not made one yet. There is a 

version they're putting together called IMBA 

Professional, and he's trying to put together a light 

version -- is what he calls it, IMBA Professional Light 

-- that has much fewer functions that might be --

possibly be affordable is what he's shooting at. That 

is not available yet. He is -- they're -- haven't 

sorted that out, but individuals would have to buy or 

organization or whatever, 'cause there's licensing 

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issues with the copyrighted software. 

MR. GRIFFON: And how -- just to follow-up on that, how 

about availability to the Board or to the 

subcontractor, can --

MR. ELLIOTT: You -- the Board and your contractor, as well 

as our contractor, all have access to the IMBA-NIOSH --

or IMBA-OCAS as special government employees or as 

contractors to the government on the program. But Dave 

is actually right and accurate in his statement. The 

ICRP models and the calculation engine from NPRB (sic) 

are copyrighted and protected and we can't distribute 

those to the public without a user's license, and 

that's the issue. Somebody has to pay for that. 

MR. GRIFFON: And you say they're available to the Board. I 

mean can we -- can we physically get a copy sent prob--

before the next meeting or how can we move forward on 

this? It'd like to get a disk copy sooner than later. 

MR. ALLEN: It can be done. We've got -- I don't know how 

we'll work out the details on -- the licensing 

agreement allows NIOSH to use it and any of its 

subcontractors for the purposes of the OCAS --

MR. ELLIOTT: Am I correct, it's not in a CD form, though, 

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it's in a -- it goes on a server. Right? 

MR. ALLEN: No, it's in a CD. 

MR. ELLIOTT: It is in a CD. 

MR. ALLEN: Yeah. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Okay. Well, we'll get that --

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, you can work with them then and --

MR. GRIFFON: Okay. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, Mike has a question here. 

MR. GIBSON: Can you tell me -- do you know off-hand how 

much of the data you get from these DOE sites is 

assumptions, default factors, solubility class, the 

date of intake? 

MR. ALLEN: For the most part, if it's bioassay -- that's 

why we want the raw data. If it's bioassay analysis, 

it's a mass spec or an alpha spec or even a gross 

alpha, that's -- counts or activity in that urine, for 

example. There's no assumptions that went into it. 

It's a laboratory analysis. And then from there we 

have to make the assumptions as far as solubility and 

all that. And the assumptions we use are the reason we 

have to put together these site profiles that was the 

last lecture. We have to have some idea of what 

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material they had so that we know what type of 

solubilities that would be associated with it, and then 

we make sure that the bioassay actually fits that data, 

if the assumptions are accurate or not. 

MR. GIBSON: But your -- are you looking at the date of the 

bioassay -- was taken or --

MR. ALLEN: Yes. Yeah, we -- we get the date that a sample 

was taken; you know, what was taken, such as a urine 

sample; how much, was it a 24-hour sample or was it a -

- you know, an allotment; the actual results, such as a 

gross alpha or it could be picocuries per liter of 

plutonium, for example; what isotope if they have that. 

Everything we can get, we get. We're not shy about 

asking for it. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay on that, Mike, or did you have a followup? 

MR. GIBSON: I don't know if I understand it all, but I --

that'll answer for now, yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: And you're saying basically you're not 

utilizing assumptions that may have been made on the 

site 'cause on the site they also presumably do some 

sort of dose calculation, in many cases the 50-year 

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committed dose --

MR. ALLEN: Using ICRP-30 models --

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

MR. ALLEN: -- so what they've used -- the doses they've 

calculated are not necessarily good for us, and very 

few sites have ever calculated an annual organ dose. 

DR. ZIEMER: So you don't find there's any value in looking 

at what they may have ultimately calculated for tissue 

dose or organ dose? 

MR. ALLEN: There could be some value in it, especially -- I 

mean information's always limiting, and if that's all I 

can get is a calculated dose, you can pretty much -- if 

you get enough details, you can back-calculate what the 

bioassay was that that came from. Also as far as the 

solubilities, same general -- you know, we hope that 

we're not complete ends of the spectrum on what they're 

-- have been assuming and what we're going to assume. 

There should be some reason if there's a -- if we're 

completely different. 

DR. ZIEMER: He's got a follow-up. 

MR. GIBSON: If you had like a super-Y class of plutonium, 

how would you be able to distinguish that or could that 

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mask your raw data out of the bioassay... 

MR. ALLEN: It really couldn't mask the raw data, but it 

could mask the dose and the intake that you're 

calculating from the raw data. And the way that can be 

handled -- as I said, we have default classes that can 

be picked, but we can also input our own user input. 

For us to use a super class-Y plutonium, we would 

probably put together a Technical Information Bulletin 

evaluating a particular site, what they had, saying the 

solubility doesn't follow the defaults and we have more 

information, and in that case use these absorption 

parameters for this site, is how we would handle that, 

and we haven't done that yet. What's -- we haven't 

changed from any defaults yet, but we're still kind of 

young into that part. 

DR. MELIUS: Just one -- I think it's a brief question, but 

back just to the validation. Have you documented the 

validation you've done? 

MR. ALLEN: Part of our contract for the upgrade is a whole 

documentation on all the V&B that NRPB has done. 

DR. MELIUS: Okay. And then your further --

MR. ALLEN: Our further evaluation, we have documented not 

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in a very formal manner, okay? That's one of those 

things you just never seem to get to. We've got all 

the numbers and it's a matter of writing down something 

and documenting it. 

DR. MELIUS: I just think that would be helpful to do. I 

know it's hard to get to, but it's one of those things 

-- things that I think at some point, if questions are 

raised, it would be good to have. 

MR. ALLEN: Yeah, I understand. It's just once you get --

once you have run the numbers, you know it works, the 

actual --

DR. MELIUS: No, I -- I --

MR. ALLEN: It tends to get pushed to the back burner. 

MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, just one final thing on the validation 

side of it, do you know if there are any plans to 

update the CINDY* code to be ICRP-60/66 compatible? I 

know right now it runs in 30, and if that's going on, 

that may be another tool that you can validate against 

or whatever. I don't know if that's happening. 

MR. ALLEN: I don't know if that's happening. I haven't 

heard of that. I know there is a number of -- a number 

of other codes out there. For the most part, they're 

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kind of home-brewed. Like Potter put one together, and 

there's someone else that put a math CAD-1 together, I 

think, and --

MR. GRIFFON: French or --

MR. ALLEN: Nothing that's very versatile for what we're 

doing. 

DR. ZIEMER: Tony. 

DR. ANDRADE: A quick answer to Mark's question. When we 

were asked by DOE to assist in the development of IMBA, 

we were all forced to shell out some big bucks, and so 

in doing so DOE elected for us to invest in this 

particular code. So if CINDY is being upgraded, then 

it's got to be getting done sort of at a -- at the 

grassroots level somewhere. 

UNIDENTIFIED: Good answer. 

MR. GRIFFON: Just -- just one final question, Paul. I'm 

curious if you've -- just in individual cases, you 

mentioned bioassay data a lot. Have you had the 

occasion to use air sampling data to validate your dose 

calculations from your bioassay, and I don't know how 

often you're able to get the air sampling data that 

might be appropriate for certain individuals, but have 

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you had the -- have you done that frequently or --

MR. ALLEN: No. I would love to, but getting the air sample 

data, especially from like a major DOE facility and 

correlating that to an individual throughout a 20-year 

career is virtually impossible. We can get some ball 

park estimates if we could get the data, but because it 

wouldn't be that useful in that situation, we haven't 

gone -- trying to get it. It's also fairly difficult 

to get ahold of, as far as 20 years, 30 years back. 

You can get some general ideas, but the details is hard 

to --

MR. GRIFFON: I'm not sure I agree with the it wouldn't be 

very useful part of that statement, but otherwise I 

agree with you. I mean -- I mean I think there might 

be some usefulness for certain priority operations or 

areas within certain sites to have that as a backdrop, 

and if you knew a person worked in that facility over a 

certain period of time, you could do some cross-checks 

or -- and I certainly have noticed also that that's 

lacking in the site profile documentation, too, so I 

would encour-- I think that's a useful tool to -- if 

nothing el-- I mean I know it's probably going to 

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increase your uncertainty in your overall estimate in 

many cases, but it's another piece of information, as 

you said earlier, which I -- you know, it may be 

valuable in certain circumstances. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. We're at the lunch hour. I think 

it's appropriate now for us to recess for lunch and 

we'll come back together at 1:30. 

(Whereupon, a luncheon recess was taken.) 

WORKGROUP ON OPTIONS FOR EVALUATING INTERVIEWS
 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. We're ready to call the 

meeting back to order. I trust you all had a good 

lunch and are ready for another working session. 

We're going to begin our afternoon session with a working 

report from our workgroup on options for evaluating 

interviews. Dr. Melius has been the Chairperson of 

that workgroup and he's going to report to us and 

perhaps make a recommendation. 

(Pause) 

Okay, Dr. Melius. 

DR. MELIUS: Okay. Since our last meeting in St. Louis, the 

workgroup has had one additional conference call -- was 

it last week? Yeah, last week, Wednesday. We met by 

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conference call and discussed -- and had received some 

additional information from NIOSH, which were the --

basically the ORAU procedures for doing the interviews 

and scheduling the interviews and so forth. Based on 

the information that we had received and I think 

recognizing that -- that NIOSH's and ORAU's program to 

sort of review the interviews and some of the quality 

assurance/quality control measures were a work in 

progress -- they were developing these really as -- as 

we were meeting, and as the program was getting --

getting implemented -- we've -- came up with a set of 

recommendations which I think everyone has in front of 

them here about things that might -- these covered two 

areas. One is things that NIOSH might do as part of --

and actually it may currently be -- already be doing as 

part of its quality assurance/quality control program 

for the interviews -- that would be helpful for the 

Advisory Board if some of this -- these steps were --

or procedures or events were captured in some way as 

part of a -- the database so that we would be able to -

- the Board would be able to go back at some point in 

time and evaluate these or our contractor might as a 

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way of evaluating the interview process in the context 

of the dose reconstructions that are going on. And so 

we've made a basic recommendation there to -- to NIOSH. 

It's not meant to be overly prescriptive for NIOSH, 

but to -- that basically the program be further 

developed and that -- and we've given some examples of 

things that might be captured. Almost all of these 

examples are things that NIOSH -- in fact all of them 

may be very well things that NIOSH or ORAU is already 

doing. And the question is just to make sure that 

there is some record that keeps track of these, and in 

some sense a tracking system is -- that would allow 

review. 

The second part of our recommendation is that -- then --

that as part of the dose reconstruction -- dose 

construction review process that would undertake that 

then as currently cons-- currently described, this --

our dose reconstruction will be -- program review will 

also be evaluating the outputs from the interview, the 

way the interviews are recorded, and also some of the 

other information that's kept in the individual record 

to that. And so that's what's captured in this second 

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recommendation there. 

Now I've circulated this to the members of the working 

group, also to Paul. Paul's listened in and 

participated in our last conference call. I really 

didn't receive any comments or corrections from the 

workgroup, but they're free to correct or whatever as 

we go along, but -- but I think it's more important 

sort of the concept -- again, to go back, what we're 

trying to deal with is the issue of should there be --

should the Board be either repeating or taking some 

steps that would be more intrusive in terms of 

evaluating the interview process, be that a second 

interview, independent interview, a review of a 

transcript of an interview or recording of -- of 

interview and that the Board is probably split on that 

issue as to whether or not that should be done or 

whether that's too much of a intrusion or imposition on 

the people that -- on the claimants and so that these 

steps in place and based on the results of -- of this 

review, then the Board at a later point in time could 

make an assessment as to whether or not a more 

intrusive form of review of the interviews might --

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would or would not be necessary. 

I don't know if any other members of the working group have 

any comments you want to add to that. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, before we take comments, the Chair is 

going to interpret this as a recommendation -- it is a 

recommendation from a working group and as such 

constitutes a formal motion before the Board, doesn't 

require a second. And so with that as background, we 

can have comments, which could include modification. 

Let me also add, and as Jim indicated, I did listen in on 

this and I want to make sure -- particularly that the 

NIOSH staff understands that this Board is not 

mandating specific things that NIOSH do. We do not 

want to micro-manage NIOSH. The -- as I understand the 

intention of item one and the list of (a) through (f) 

is that in fact these are the kinds of records we would 

like to be able to sample as a Board, and if they 

existed, we would then in turn be able to evaluate the 

-- the process, the interview process more readily. 

Whether -- I think we believe that probably most of 

these exist in some form -- either formally or 

informally -- but the whole idea there was to identify 

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the kinds of things we -- that probably the Board would 

want to sample that would make it much -- make the 

audit more readily conductible. Is that a fair --

UNIDENTIFIED: And informative. 

DR. ZIEMER: And informative. Is that a fair statement, 

Jim? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, and -- and --

DR. ZIEMER: And let's begin with Wanda, and then we'll jump 

down to Tony. And you can speak for or against the 

motion or modify or just comment. 

MS. MUNN: My apologies for not having gotten back to our --

our working group chair with a couple of comments that 

I had. I think they were both captured by comments 

that we made during our actual discussion, but I felt 

perhaps were not fully gathered here. I had thought we 

might meet once more before we actually presented 

anything in writing to the group and -- but most of --

most of what I had -- had -- most of the changes I had 

made were purely editorial. They didn't change the 

sense of what was going on here. 

The one thing that I did not feel was captured that -- was 

the suggestion that I made, which remains important in 

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my mind, that it would be most helpful from an auditing 

point of view to have a single document where a record 

had at least been signed off on by individuals who had 

done these specific actions that were listed here. I 

don't think that such a document would be an undue 

burden if it went along with the case file, wherever it 

went. But that's something that certainly would be 

simply a suggestion as a potential tool that might be 

considered. And I can see no reason why it would have 

to be written, necessarily. It's --

DR. ZIEMER: Wanda, are you suggesting a specific change? I 

seem to recall you characterized that as a tracking 

system in the phone call. Was that --

MS. MUNN: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: Am I thinking about the right thing? 

MS. MUNN: Yes, you are. Yeah, I was thinking about a 

specific document that would serve as a tracking 

document. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, is that item (f) or is that different 

than item (f)? 

MS. MUNN: Well, I think -- I interpreted item (f) to 

incorporate that, but perhaps -- if one had not heard 

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the discussion, I thought just reading (f) as it was 

perhaps would not make it as clear as what I had in 

mind. I had a simple sheet of paper in mind which 

would be a check-off or a sign-off document for various 

steps that needed to be gone through, which were over 

and above the mechanical processes that are done 

electronically. But no, I'm not asking for any 

changes. I just wanted a clarification statement. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Tony? 

DR. ANDRADE: With respect to Wanda's comment, I would just 

like to say that if -- if an electronic system is put 

into place, such as we suggest here, then a paper which 

would essentially be a traveler, as we call it, could 

be generated from that electronic system's -- at any 

particular point in time, at -- with any particular 

case, such that the audit function would be very, very 

easy to accomplish. So I think that if we can 

accomplish what's written down in item (f), then the 

paper document would be a natural. It'd be -- it would 

follow on naturally. 

Again, in keeping with what Paul said, I, too, do not want 

to be overly prescriptive or to try to dictate the work 

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that -- that NIOSH should do. However, I did want to 

point out that a QAQ (sic) system is -- is really meant 

for those people that are implementing these -- these 

processes. It's meant for their own quality 

development and improvement. And therefore we should 

not lose sight of the fact that NIOSH should own the 

program, should evaluate the program. ORAU should be -

- should use the procedures that are developed, and 

that the Board should also keep track of what's going 

on. And I believe this is also an item for our 

subcontractor to look at. Am I wrong? 

DR. ZIEMER: There is part of the task which is --

DR. ANDRADE: There is part of a task there might --

DR. ZIEMER: -- this, and in fact when we're talking about 

doing this in terms of "us", that includes our 

contractor. 

DR. ANDRADE: Right. Okay. I, too, wanted to hand over a 

couple of -- both editorial and maybe one or two 

substantive comments, and I don't know if this is the 

appropriate time to delve into those. 

DR. ZIEMER: That's fine. 

DR. ANDRADE: Okay. I try to skip over the editorial piece. 

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Let me just get back to the very last paragraph in 

this draft document, and it refers to the fact that --

I think next to the last -- sorry, the last sentence. 

However -- it reads: However, the need for this should 

be re-evaluated at a later time -- and we're talking 

about re-interviewing claimants -- based on the results 

of the dose reconstruction review and the 

implementation of the QA/QC program described above. 

Well, QA/QC is meant for quality improvement, meaning 

improving processes into the future. They should not 

be looked at as an avenue to go back and look at things 

retrospectively. Which brings us to the heart of the 

matter. 

I think that we as a Board should vote and should decide 

once and for all whether re-interviewing is actually 

even on the table. I believe it shouldn't be. I 

believe it's onerous. I believe that the only people 

that are going to be called are those people who have 

had their claims rejected and that it's going to be 

just a heart-wrenching experience for those people. 

And I really don't see any tremendous incremental value 

added in even thinking about that. 

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So with that, you know, I would -- I would essentially vote 

for taking out most of that sentence, starting with the 

word "based". But of course that really can't be done 

until this Board comes to -- comes to grip with that 

issue, and I really do believe that we should do that. 

DR. ZIEMER: Tony, I'm not sure whether you're making a 

motion to amend or simply at this time reflecting that 

viewpoint... 

DR. ANDRADE: Well, I --

DR. ZIEMER: Could you clarify for me? 

DR. ANDRADE: Okay, Paul. I guess there'd be a two -- twophased approach to this. One is, I think that the 

Board should discuss whether or not retrospective or 

re-interviewing is even on the table for us to 

consider. That's one. 

And if it is not, then I would move to amend the draft as it 

-- as it -- as it stands, at least for the --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, I might point out that it -- it may turn 

out to be a moot point whether or not we include it in 

this document. The Board could always -- even if this 

were deleted, the Board could at a later date decide, 

for whatever reason it wished, that something different 

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should be done. We're not binding ourselves in one 

direction or the other. I suspect that the statement 

as it stands simply points out that the door could 

still be open for that possibility in the future. 

You're suggesting let's not even open it --

DR. ANDRADE: I don't think we --

DR. ZIEMER: -- and I'm saying that even if we did that, 

there would be nothing to prevent the Board in the 

future from changing its mind in any event. And I say 

that in the context where I myself have been basically 

opposed to the idea of re-interviewing, if only for the 

fact that a re-interview is not in fact the same as the 

original interview. It is different in time and in 

pla-- space. The interviewer would be a different 

person than the original one, presumably. You could 

not reproduce the conditions of the original interview. 

You might in fact elicit different responses from 

interviewees. You might elicit things that the 

interviewee did not even think of the first time 

around, so it's very difficult for me to imagine a reinterview as a quality check on the original interview 

so much as these items, which are a way of getting at 

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the issue of whether or not the information from the 

interview was properly captured and used in the record 

and in the determination of the eligibility of the 

person for compensation. 

But be that as it may, I think we need to hear from others. 

I guess you're not making the motion at this time, or 

are you? 

DR. ANDRADE: No. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Thank you. Okay, let's start with 

Henry, and then Mark and then Jim. 

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah, I'm -- I think the recommendations are 

good ones. I think the decision as to whether one 

would re-interview -- I think this basically sets that 

aside, because it'll depend on what the QA/QC program 

is that we need to know is where -- is a second set of 

ears sitting in and listening interacting then to 

improve the interviews as they go forward, if the set 

of ears is saying we're going to listen on every 

interview, but each interview only has 20 seconds worth 

of listening in, then you know, we sort of need to know 

is the person going to listen to the whole interview 

and then, you know, comment back to the interviewers 

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'cause they're all learning as they go anyway. I think 

part of the QA/QC how -- how it's designed would 

relieve a great deal of concern about the interview. 

And I think that's kind of why I support this language 

that I think what we're basically saying here is that's 

an option, but we aren't -- we don't need to really 

think about that till we see, gee, if you look at all 

these interviews, if there doesn't -- if they don't 

seem to be generating anything or everybody's in 

agreement, then I don't think we'd move forward. So I 

really think we need to have this for a kind of an 

audit trail so that when our people come in they can 

look at this and say yes, this one was -- somebody did 

listen in and so when we look at it, there was 

agreement between the person who listened in with the 

interviewer as to how the information was recorded and 

what was heard. So you know, our earlier discussion 

about should our person sit in and listen and take 

notes, here their internal auditor is doing that and 

it's a question of then seeing how is that used or how 

extensive is that -- that listening in and what is the 

feedback loop for it. So I -- I think what's here is -

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- is a good first step and it'll help us down the line 

when we look at inter-- an interview and say gee, you 

know, there doesn't seem to be much here. I wonder --

or something like that. We would have that answer in 

whatever the audit program was, so that's why I think 

it's very helpful and I -- I don't -- you know, I'm --

I'm assuming or I'm hoping that whatever is designed 

and shared with us, we would view that, after the fact, 

as being sufficient for us not to be concerned about 

the interview process. But that -- that's a -- yet to 

be determined till we get into actually looking at the 

individual cases or our contractor starts generating 

that to say gee, here's some improvements we might want 

to recommend. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Mark? 

MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, I guess the first thing that strikes me 

in this -- in these recommendations is that it -- it's 

really recommending internal audit as opposed to a 

Board audit. And Tony is right that the tasks as we 

laid them out for the subcontractor right now do 

include a review of the procedures and the interview 

form. And I think that'll be telling -- once we 

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initiate that, we may have some good input and sense of 

that. 

I guess I expected that these audit recommendations and the 

listening in, as Henry described it, might be a Board 

function. I'm sorry -- and -- and then the other --

you know, I would also -- I think that last language, 

the re-interviewing, I don't know if the notion of 

requiring taping -- I know we had some early 

discussions about that and there are some complications 

about that. I don't know if the working group 

discussed that any further. You know, pending the 

outcome of the initial review of the procedures and the 

interview form and maybe of this internal audit, you 

know, we may -- we may want to go to -- and I know 

there -- there's hurdles to get over for that, but we 

may want to go to a function where we tape some of 

these interviews and then we can audit them in that 

fashion instead of re-interviewing, necessarily --

'cause I know there's certainly pitfalls with the reinterviewing process, but -- but - but I guess -- one 

think I would ask the working group is, you know, this 

being an internal audit by NIOSH, did -- did you have 

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discussions about the Board doing this -- these steps 

(a) through (f) or whatever? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, let me -- 'cause --

MR. GRIFFON: Or maybe I just need clarification, I don't 

know. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

MR. GRIFFON: Yeah. 

DR. MELIUS: I think if you look at this -- I may have 

mischaracterized it. One and two is the NIOSH program. 

If you go to the last -- is what NIOSH will do is a 

QA/QC program to improve -- be improving the interview. 

If you go to the last paragraph, it's what the -- what 

we're doing, the Board is doing and doing that, and 

that was really another working group and the Board 

that is laid out the parameters for that and I think 

we've talked about it at other -- other meetings. 

And then I think we're making -- maybe the wording isn't as 

complete as it could be, but we're making a statement 

that, you know, based on this imple-- implementation of 

these two things, the NIOSH QA/QC program -- it's 

called that -- our individual dose reconstruction 

reviews that involve evaluating the interview record, 

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therefore at this time we're not recommending that 

there be any further -- more intrusive way of --

potentially more intrusive way of reviewing the 

interviews, whether it be listening in or reinterviewing or reviewing a recording of the interview 

or -- or how -- whatever that may be 'cause they all 

raised a number of -- number of issues, you know, 

beyond what we've talked about here, so -- a big 

headache for Larry to deal with and some of these could 

be, anyway. So I think that therefore we're -- you 

know, this is our recommendation at this point in time, 

and I think we have to leave it open and see what 

happens down the road and see what the results of these 

are. 

DR. ZIEMER: Larry, you had a comment? 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yes, if I might. You've heard me speak about 

this before, and in the spirit of being helpful and not 

in the spirit of belligerency or -- or unhelpfulness, 

these set of recommendations are appropriate, we feel, 

for an understanding of what it is the Board would like 

to audit on this piece of the process. Many of these 

are already in place or being developed. Yes, we want 

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to be very clear that we don't have all of these fully 

developed and fully functional, but that's the 

direction that we are going. You've heard me say from 

the very start that we think the Board's audit should 

evaluate the interview process and how they contribute 

to dose reconstructions. 

Now, just for your benefit, you've also heard me say that 

re-interviewing claimants is off the table. And it's 

not this Board's decision at the end that's going to 

make that -- that'll carry that day. The Department 

will weigh in on whether or not this actually happens. 

If you so choose to leave the door open, that's one 

thing. But if you choose to ask for a re-evaluation 

and re-interview of claimants, the Department will have 

to weigh in on that. So I just offer that as helpful 

perspective, not as a belligerent perspective. I want 

you to understand, at the end of the day the Department 

will have to decide the value of that particular 

component if you choose to re-interview claimants. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Okay. Let's go right down the 

line. Leon? 

MR. OWENS: I'd just like to say that I agree with the 

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recommendations by the working group. I think they've 

done a very good job. 

In regard to the re-interview process, I appreciate Larry's 

comments, but I do think that we need to at all times 

consider the credibility of the program and by making 

that consideration with the claimants, particularly the 

elderly, that are not as well-versed in this process as 

we might be, I think there would be value-added in a 

re-interview from the standpoint of quality assurance. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Roy? 

DR. DEHART: We have a proposal here, and I assume that the 

rationale for that is that we're not sure that the 

current interview system is working effectively. I 

would ask the question, having done 20,000 interviews 

as was presented today, are we aware of any significant 

problems with the interview process? 

MR. ELLIOTT: I would answer that question this way, that 

no, we are not aware of any problems in our interview 

process. ORAU does have the manager of that particular 

task and other delegated folks in that part of the 

program listen in -- and it's not just for 20 seconds; 

it's for the whole interview that -- they listen to the 

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whole interview and feedback is provided. 

I will also say this, that there have been a number of cases 

that I have approved to go over to DOL where I have 

seen how the interview has been captured and utilized 

in the dose reconstruction, and how it's reflected in 

the dose reconstruction report. So I'm fairly 

comfortable and confident in saying to you today that 

this interview process is a contributing factor to dose 

reconstruction, and we have not identified any major 

problems with it. But we're watching it very closely. 

DR. DEHART: I gather from what you had said previously that 

you're in the process of developing just what is being 

suggested here, basically -- a way of going through and 

documenting that the -- basically (a) through (f) --

some modifications will be occurring. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Several of these are in place. They're 

perhaps not at a state of readiness that we are happy 

with. Some -- a couple of these are not in place, but 

they're -- we've had similar ideas and we intend to put 

them into place -- (f) for instance is one -- you know, 

we don't have in place right now, I don't believe, 

necessarily, but we do agree it needs to be put to --

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put in place. And the traveling document, hard copy, 

would go along with that, so -- appreciate those 

thoughts and those comments. 

DR. ZIEMER: And if I might add, again, I just observed the 

work of the subcommittee (sic), I don't think there was 

an assumption that there was something wrong currently 

with the interview process. The real issue is how do 

we carry out our responsibility of evaluating it. And 

I certainly became aware as we got the materials from 

Dr. Toohey on -- on what they do and how they do that -

- for example, they do have a management tool where 

they listen in to the interviews. Great, how do we 

critique that? If the -- is that available for us to 

look at so we can say what -- what was the evaluation 

of the listener of that interview. So these things 

simply reflect the kinds of records that could be 

audited where we could make a judgment. Yeah, the 

interview was properly reflected -- and all the things 

that Larry just described. We want to be able to -- to 

confirm those kinds of things, how the interviews are 

used in the dose reconstruction, if indeed they are; 

how they've contributed to it. So it's a matter of 

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simply being able to document what has been talked 

about here. 

We'll go on to Tony, and then we'll circle back again. 

DR. ANDRADE: Okay. Perhaps -- perhaps my comments have 

been overblown a little bit, or perhaps I overblew them 

a little bit. If the process that we're suggesting 

remains internal and a re-interview is -- is -- let's 

say it's decided by one of the reviewers here in the 

list that runs from (a) to (d), determines that more 

information is necessary -- like an internal decision 

to re-interview is appropriate before the case is 

closed. 

However, that's just -- I'd just make sure that everybody 

knows where I'm coming from. Once the Board has 

decided to take a look at these things, I understood 

that we were going to be looking at cases that were 

closed. Those are the cases that I'm concerned about. 

If they are closed, if there has been a decision that 

was not positive, then I don't want to see our 

recommendations used to try to provide an avenue to 

redress the decision. That's where I'm coming from. 

If we're talking about the internal processes that have been 

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described, then I'm fine, and this language is 

perfectly fine. 

DR. ZIEMER: They can re-interview now. 

DR. ANDRADE: Go ahead? 

DR. ZIEMER: They can re-interview currently if they need 

more information. That's not --

DR. ANDRADE: As many times as they need. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- the issue that's being -- that's not the 

issue, I don't think. I think the issue was exactly 

what you described; you want to re-interview a closed 

case. 

DR. ANDRADE: Right. 

DR. ZIEMER: That was the -- all right, let's go back here -

- is it Mark next? Then Jim. 

MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, just a couple of things. I mean I -- I 

think -- you know, one thing that I've heard in 

previous meetings from public comment is that there is 

a concern with the interview and the information that's 

being collected, so I don't know that we don't have any 

concerns over it. We've heard that expressed at 

several meetings. Maybe those things have been 

corrected. I don't -- you know, that was a while --

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some of these were a while ago, but you know, to say 

that we haven't had any concerns over this, I think is 

not -- is not true. I think we do have some concerns 

over that. 

The second thing I was going to ask is if the Department's 

policy is that re-interviewing is off the table, what -

- what's the policy on this -- we -- we did bring up 

the idea of taping and creating a transcript of the 

interviews upon the consent of the claimant, obviously. 

Is that off the table? Can that be -- is that 

something that the -- the Department would consider? I 

know it -- there's hurdles involved, but --

MR. ELLIOTT: We have considered that, and we have 

articulated the problems associated with that numerous 

times. And at this juncture, it's -- it's not a viable 

recourse. 

DR. ZIEMER: Jim? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, a few comments -- address some of -- some 

of these points. First, as Mark said, I mean the 

interview is a very public part of the program, and we 

are much more likely to have people concerned about 

their interview than to ask questions about IMBUS (sic) 

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or how IMBUS is calculated or -- or whatever, what 

assumptions were used or these other technical 

information. So it's always going to be very visible, 

and so I think in -- and people may sort of attribute 

more importance to it than is appropriate in their 

individual case or something, and particularly given 

the time frame involved, the survivor issue and so 

forth. And so I think we have to have a credible 

process in place. NIOSH has to have a credible program 

to review it and then continue to -- continue 

improvement issue, and then the Board has to have a 

credible process for -- for reviewing it, so -- read 

there -- and again, in going through it, we didn't see 

any particular problems. However, what we did notice 

was that there were a number of places that NIOSH had -

- steps NIOSH had in place that reviewed the interview. 

They were listening in, there was an initial review, 

there's a later review. I think the question of are we 

going to find problem-- potentially find problems with 

the interview -- probably going to come up -- the issue 

with -- at the point of the individual dose 

reconstruction where someone's looking in a lot of 

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detail at all the information on the case and would 

notice discrepancies, potential problems. Those may 

very well be dealt with by, you know, a quick check of 

the record or a quick call back to the person for 

clarification or something, and that's fine. And all 

we're asking for here is really that that be reported 

in some way so we -- so we have a record of it and so 

forth. So I think that's -- go forward. 

I think -- yeah, we understand the Department's going to be 

resistant to re-interviewing and so forth. At the same 

time, we have an obligation, you know, that Congress 

gave us to review the dose construction --

reconstruction program, and we have to be able to say 

that we're -- that we as a Board are doing that 

properly. And if -- and that means we have to be able 

to say something about the interview program. And we 

don't want to be put in the position where we're having 

to say that we could not carry out our assigned mission 

because we weren't given the capability or the access 

or tools necessary to -- to review a major part of this 

program. I think what we've laid out here may get us 

there, so I think that's --

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DR. ZIEMER: I think that's a good point, Jim. I think the 

subcommittee (sic), at least from what I heard, felt 

like if there was in place a good quality assurance 

program and that that could be audited, in fact we 

would be able to reach the level of confidence that 

we're talking about -- a good possibility of reaching 

that without having to do a re-interview. But these 

would be key items that would help us get there, and 

that was the thrust of it, I believe. 

Okay. Roy again? 

DR. DEHART: No. 

DR. ZIEMER: No. Okay. Gen, Gen Roessler. 

DR. ROESSLER: I'm totally in support of the proposal here 

and the motion down through number two, but I'm not 

comfortable with even bringing in the wording about reinterviewing, for the same reasons that Tony has 

stated. Even though it says we're not going to do it 

at this time, by bringing in the wording, it leaves it 

open. And I just think that's inappropriate. I think 

I would totally support this if we went with Tony's 

friendly motion or whatever it was, but it --

DR. ZIEMER: I don't know if Tony actually made the motion. 

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You're certainly free to make the motion if you wish -

-

DR. ROESSLER: I guess what I'm saying is I'm totally for 

this if we can take out those sentences that include 

re-interviewing, even though it says we don't recommend 

it at this time. Just bringing the wording in leaves 

it open. It leaves it sounding like this is a 

consideration, and I -- well, maybe if it is later on, 

it could be brought up later on, but I -- I don't think 

the wording needs to be in it at this time. 

DR. ZIEMER: And again I'll point out, I don't know if 

you're making the motion yet or not, whether it's there 

or not doesn't preclude the Board taking some other 

action at a later date in any event, whether or not you 

wanted to. 

DR. ROESSLER: But then I --

DR. ZIEMER: Are you making a motion to amend by deleting 

the last two sentences? 

DR. ROESSLER: I could do that. Yeah, I -- I think the 

point is, whether it's there or not, if we can do it 

later on, let's just leave it for later on. Let's not 

even bring in the thoughts at this time. I don't see 

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that it adds anything, and I think it detracts from --

DR. ZIEMER: So are you speaking in favor of the motion that 

you haven't yet made, or... 

DR. ROESSLER: I guess I was hoping Tony would make the 

amendment to the motion. I think he had the wording. 

DR. ANDRADE: I'll let Mike --

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, we have a comment first from Mike. 

MR. GIBSON: Just on the issue of the re-interview, you 

know, I don't think we're trying to say that, you know, 

NIOSH isn't doing the right thing, asking the right 

questions as they know them. But there could be some 

things that come up during a site profile that would --

could possibly reflect back on the claimant and they 

would need to re-interview them, too, that wasn't 

necessarily known to NIOSH at the time. 

DR. ZIEMER: Any further comments? Are there -- does anyone 

wish to amend this document before we vote on it? If 

there are no... There appears that -- okay, Tony. I'm 

not trying to urge you to do it. You can either... 

DR. ANDRADE: I really don't want to have another meeting to 

discuss all of the intricacies here. Mike brings up a 

very good point, and there are other concerns on the 

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table. But I think we've had our Federal official 

advise us about the likelihood of us ever doing 

retrospective interview after a final decision has been 

made, and I -- based on that, I think -- not I think, I 

will make the motion that the only change really --

this is a -- this is a very well-done draft here, Jim, 

that the only change that I would submit for the 

Board's consideration in a motion to move on this is 

that we delete the last two sentences of the document 

and go forth with the rest as a recommendation to 

NIOSH. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. This is a motion to amend the document 

by deleting the last two sentences. Is it --

DR. ROESSLER: I second it. 

DR. ZIEMER: Seconded. Now is there discussion on the 

motion to amend? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, here and then there. 

DR. MELIUS: (Off microphone) Yeah, a couple of points. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Use your mike, please, Jim. 

DR. MELIUS: Sorry, I didn't realize that Gen had borrowed 

it here. 

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Two things. With all due respect to our Federal official, 

we are -- our charge is in some ways separate from them 

and I -- I hate to have us be doing an amendment in 

reference to having Larry tell us we shouldn't be --

what we can and cannot do to review the program we're 

supposed to be reviewing. I think that raises some 

issues about our -- our charge. I think -- appreciate 

what he's telling us factually and -- and so forth and 

I don't think that's his motive, but I think --

(Inaudible) by that. 

Number two, my understanding of the charge to our working 

group was to deal with this issue, and in some sense 

the reference to re-interviewing is because of the way 

Paul gave us the charge and the discussions we had in 

order to carry this out. And it was specifically not 

to design how the program could be reviewed or develop 

what's the best review of the interview process, but 

rather were there things that we could do that would be 

sufficient, short of re-interviewing or some other, 

more intrusive process that -- to do. And I think -- I 

think we need to have that reference in there. I don't 

think it commits us one way or the other and if there's 

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wording that would, you know, add -- you know, reinterviewing or other methods of evaluation, that's 

fine. But I think we need that reference -- reference 

in there. You know, I -- quite frankly, I think the 

committee's split on this issue and -- and it's a hard 

one to deal with conceptually. I think the way we're 

taking -- again, aside from those two sentences, the 

way we're taking is a way of trying to develop a 

compromise that everybody can live with and -- and then 

when we get, you know, down the road, whatever it will 

be a year or two years when we have this information, 

we'll be able to make a more informed recommendation 

one way or the other. And maybe our differences will 

be less at that point in time, but I certainly feel 

that that's -- this should be -- reference should be 

kept in there. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. So you're speaking against the motion. 

Okay. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Point of clarification. 

DR. ZIEMER: Point of clarification. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Point of clarification, the charge to the 

working group was specific in evaluating options or 

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identifying options to evaluate the interview process. 

DR. MELIUS: That's not the way that Paul gave me the 

charge. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, I don't recall the exact wording. I can 

tell you that the Chair's objective is to try to find a 

way to audit this without doing interviews, but -- but 

MR. ELLIOTT: I can assure you, that's the exact charge from 

the transcript. I sent it to the working group the 

other day. 

DR. ZIEMER: But I -- but I don't -- again, let me point 

out, it doesn't -- I'm not speaking for or against the 

motion. I would point out if the sentences are struck, 

this does not preclude anything. It simply doesn't 

address it right now. 

Henry? 

DR. ANDERSON: I guess one -- one argument I would see for 

leaving it in is it provides some institutional memory 

that in four years every Board member here could rotate 

off. In a year we may have --

DR. ZIEMER: Where did you get the four? 

DR. ANDERSON: Well, the assignments is -- the assignments 

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are one to four years. I rotate off in four months, 

and there's two others -- we haven't -- it hasn't been 

discussed here -- are slated to potentially rotate off 

or at least would have to be renominated, others would 

be -- potentially could come on, so one of the benefits 

I see of having this here is we've -- we've spent, I 

would say, almost an inordinate amount of time 

discussing it, but it isn't reflected anywhere in any 

of -- a recommendation or things we've made, so yes, 

it's there kind of lost and forever of the transcripts. 

Somebody would have to go back if, when the review 

comes up four years from now, and somebody says well, 

let's go back and see what our recommendations -- were 

they met, this would just remind you well, here's an 

option that was discussed. So that -- I think it's 

helpful to have this. It doesn't make a commitment, 

but as you say, you could go back, but somebody may not 

even remember about --

DR. ZIEMER: Let me point out, Henry, where this is going to 

appear and that is in the transcripts. 

DR. ANDERSON: Well, but -- but if you --

DR. ZIEMER: The transcripts are there already. That's the 

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institutional memory. This is -- this is no better 

than the transcripts in which it will appear anyway, 

one way or the other. The issue has appeared over and 

over in the transcripts. That's all I'm saying. 

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah, well, I -- I -- I --

DR. ZIEMER: But -- no, I do point --

DR. ANDERSON: I'm just saying --

DR. ZIEMER: I understand --

DR. ANDERSON: -- on every other board I've been on, what 

the agency pays attention to and subsequent board 

members is what are your action items and -- and we've 

tended not to maintain a list of action items. What we 

have is resolutions and recommendations that we've 

made, and one could go back and say --

DR. ZIEMER: Gotcha. 

DR. ANDERSON: -- as a new member, you'd want to -- you'd --

DR. ZIEMER: A specific action item. 

DR. ANDERSON: You'd want to know what are the specific 

issues. That -- you know, I just raise that as one 

reason for having it here. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

DR. ANDERSON: It doesn't make a commitment to do it, but to 

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have no mention of it --

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

DR. ANDERSON: -- means somebody has to think of it later 

down the --

DR. ZIEMER: You speak for the motion then. Anyone speaking 

against the motion? Okay. 

MR. ESPINOSA: Against the motion? 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, I'm going to alternate. Against the 

motion? 

MR. ESPINOSA: Yeah, I'm against the motion. I agree with 

Henry. I believe that it should be in there. It 

doesn't matter whether it's left out or put in, either 

way it does give us something to reference back on, as 

Henry's saying. So therefore I speak against the 

motion. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Anyone for the motion? 

DR. DEHART: For the motion? 

DR. ZIEMER: For the motion. 

DR. DEHART: I speak on behalf of the motion, and I'll 

explain very quickly why. The title is the 

recommendations of, and the next to the last sentence 

begins (reading) At this time, the working group is not 

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recommending... 

We're countering what we're saying in the document. I speak 

for the motion to delete. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Mark? 

MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, I'm speaking against the motion. I -- I 

-- and one of the reason-- I mean I've already spoke to 

some of my concerns about it, I reflect back on a 

veteran's program review that John Till did and one of 

the findings that they had was how important the --

they weren't even interviews, really, they were -- they 

were I guess written documents provided by some of the 

claimants in those cases, and the fact that the dose 

reconstructors may have underestimated doses in many 

cases because they didn't incorporate adequately the 

information that was identified in some of those 

interviews. So I think -- you know, this is such an 

important -- I think it's an important component. I 

think how it's designed is critical to how much 

information you're going to elicit from these people 

and how -- how useful it can be. I think it can be 

very important, though, and I -- I don't want to close 

the door. In fact, I was hoping that the working group 

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would come out with a recommendation on how to -- to 

re-interview or tape or -- or to actually have the 

Board do an audit. I think it's a little soft in that 

regard, but at least I want the last clause in that 

allows us -- reminds us that the door is open to reexamine this issue upon findings of the other steps in 

-- in section one of this document. 

DR. ZIEMER: Just for clarification, Mark, wasn't Till's 

concern that material elicited in the interviews wasn't 

in fact utilized, as opposed to the issue of not having 

adequate interviews? See, I --

MR. GRIFFON: Well, yeah -- yeah, they didn't have 

interviews, but the -- yeah. I mean but the -- they 

said that they weren't -- that they weren't really used 

by the dose reconstructors adequately and they didn't 

pay attention to them or --

DR. ZIEMER: But the issue that we have is sort of a 

separate issue. 

MR. GRIFFON: It is sort of a separate issue, but it just 

demonstrates the importance of the tool, is what I'm 

saying. 

DR. ZIEMER: The interview is definitely important. That's 

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why we're talking about reviewing it. Okay. Wanda has 

a comment. 

MS. MUNN: I need one point of clarification. We are 

talking about closed claims. Correct? 

DR. ZIEMER: Closed claims. That's correct. 

MS. MUNN: If we are talking about closed claims, then the 

consideration of re-interviews puts this Board in the 

position of being viewed by the public as a quasiappellate group. 

MR. PRESLEY: That's exactly right. 

DR. ANDRADE: Exactly. 

MS. MUNN: I am not prepared to serve as an appellate. I 

don't believe that was the charter of this group and I 

won't go there. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Further comments? Roy, you have 

another comment? Robert? 

MR. PRESLEY: Well, early on we were in Cincinnati and some 

of us witnessed some of the interviews. And I'm going 

to be honest with you. I'm -- I'm accepting to what 

they're doing. I think if we go to this, we're getting 

ourself in trouble. 

DR. ZIEMER: So you speak for the motion? 

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MR. PRESLEY: For the motion. 

DR. ZIEMER: Any other comments, for or against the motion? 

Are you ready to vote? 

Okay, those in favor of the motion, raise your right hand. 

 (Affirmative responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: One, two, three, four, five for the motion. 

Those opposed? 

 (Negative responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: One, two, three, four, five, six opposed. The 

Chair votes for the motion. We're six and six. The 

Chair rules that the motion does not pass. It requires 

a majority to pass. That's not the same as failing, 

but it doesn't pass. Which means we return to the 

original document, as written. Okay? 

Now incidentally, under Robert's Rules, anyone can challenge 

the Chair's ruling, and the challenge has to be upheld 

by two-thirds vote, so -- so the ruling is that the 

motion fails for lack of a majority. It seems like the 

Chair ought to get two votes in these cases. 

DR. ANDERSON: Actually I thought the Chair didn't vote 

unless it was a tie, but that's okay. 

DR. ZIEMER: Actually under Robert's Rules, that's generally 

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the case. But I think we agreed in our own rules that 

the Chair would always vote so that people knew where 

the Chair stood or didn't stand. 

So the motion fails and we have before us the original 

document, as written. Is there any further discussion 

on the document as written? 

Are you ready to vote on the document which -- the 

recommendations and the not recommendations of the --

usurping Roy's characterization. 

A comment, Tony? 

DR. ANDRADE: Just a quick question for you, Paul. As I 

mentioned, I didn't have a chance to provide my 

editorial and lesser comments to Jim. 

DR. ZIEMER: Can we do these as friendly amendments? Are 

they -- are they strictly editorial? 

DR. ANDRADE: They really are. 

DR. ZIEMER: Do you want to --

DR. ANDRADE: Would it be possible to do that, even if we 

adopt --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, let's do it real quick. 

DR. ANDRADE: -- the document as written? 

DR. ZIEMER: Just tell us what they are. 

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DR. ANDRADE: Okay. 

DR. ZIEMER: We'll see how friendly they are. 

DR. ANDRADE: Okay, on point number 1(a), records of the 

current -- like I said, this is editorial -- management 

monitoring instead of supervisory monitoring. 

DR. ZIEMER: Any problem with that, management monitoring? 

 (No responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: So ordered. 

DR. ANDRADE: Okay. On point (b), the second step in the 

review is not necessarily done by management, but it is 

done by another group of people that look for accuracy 

in -- both technical and editorial. And so I'd like to 

strike the word "management", and also call it the 

proper -- give it the proper title, and it's review of 

the -- and it's not completed interview, it's the 

summary report to... 

DR. ZIEMER: Is this the review that -- where somebody's 

looking at it for everything from grammar to --

DR. ANDRADE: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: What is the proper terminology we want here? 

Can on staff help --

MR. ELLIOTT: He's got it. 

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DR. ANDRADE: It is the summary report. 

DR. ZIEMER: It's the summary review, okay. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Summary report. 

DR. ANDRADE: To, and then "include" instead of "including" 

--

DR. ZIEMER: The summary review of the completed interviews? 

DR. ANDRADE: Of the summary report --

DR. ZIEMER: Summary report. 

DR. ANDRADE: Instead of completed interviews, to include --

and then here's an insertion, "items that are found to 

need further clarification" and strike everything up to 

"and corrective actions". 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Let me ask the working group, are you 

comfortable with this rewording as far as --

DR. MELIUS: That's fine, yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- it covers the intent still? Thank you. 

So is it -- let me read what I have and see if it agrees. 

Records of the summary report of the completed 

interviews, to include --

DR. ANDRADE: No, no, no, no. 

DR. ZIEMER: No? 

DR. ANDRADE: These are not completed interviews. 

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DR. ZIEMER: I'm sorry. 

DR. ANDRADE: These are still in review process. 

DR. ZIEMER: Read it again. Read it again, I --

DR. ANDRADE: Okay. Records of the review of the summary 

report, to include items that are found to need further 

clarification, including corrective actions. So by the 

word "items" I'm including anything small or large, 

including significant problems. Okay? 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

DR. ANDRADE: Item (c), second line there, "dose 

reconstruction is being done to include any items --

instead of "significant problems" -- found --

DR. ZIEMER: That is a slight -- that is probably slightly 

more than an editorial. It changes the level of 

findings, but let me ask if the working group considers 

that a friendly amendment or do you have prob-- it 

actually requires more reporting than you would have 

suggested here, I believe. It lowers the bar a bit on 

what's reported. Working group okay? Chair of the 

working group? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, that's fine. That's not... 

DR. ZIEMER: Without objection, we'll consider that a 

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friendly amendment. 

DR. ANDRADE: Okay. To continue on with that, "to include 

any items found" -- and then again an insertion -- "to 

need further clarification" -- and then we continue 

with the phrase, "and corrective actions". 

DR. ZIEMER: Ray, did you get all that, as well, for the 

record? Thank you. 

DR. ANDRADE: The very last editorial comment is in the 

phrase that falls right underneath -- right underneath 

(f). And frankly I didn't have a chance to construct 

it, but I wanted to include the fact that we are having 

a subcontractor perform part of this review, and I just 

didn't know exactly where to fit that in there, Paul. 

DR. ZIEMER: Notice that (a) through (f) are things that 

it's suggested be part of NIOSH's system so that we can 

review it, so I'm not sure we'd bring our subcontractor 

into the picture at this point, if I understand what 

you're saying. 

DR. ANDRADE: Okay. Well, maybe that's appropriate to just 

leave it off. 

DR. ZIEMER: This is just identifying sort of a body of 

kinds of records that could be reviewed, I believe. 

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DR. ANDRADE: Okay. I'll agree to that. 

DR. ZIEMER: Let me ask again, is the Board comfortable with 

these friendly amendments to the document? 

MR. OWENS: (Off microphone) On (c) --

MR. ELLIOTT: Can you speak into the microphone? 

MR. OWENS: Oh, I'm sorry. Tony, on point (c), in the 

previous (b) we changed completed interviews --

DR. ANDRADE: Right. 

MR. OWENS: -- to summary report. 

DR. ANDRADE: Right. 

MR. OWENS: And so in (c) are we going to leave completed 

interviews or are we in essence going to change that to 

summary report, also, to make it consistent? 

DR. ANDRADE: Good catch, Leon. It should be summary 

report. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, let me follow up. What is it that the 

health physicist is using, the summary or the 

interview? Is it -- do you know -- can -- who can 

answer that? One of the staff. Is -- this is saying 

records of the health physicist's review of the 

completed interviews at the time dose reconstruction's 

being done, so what is it the health physicist is using 

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at that point, is the question. 

MR. ALLEN: Paul --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

MR. ALLEN: Well, the completed interview we call the 

summary report of the interview. It's a summary 

because it's not a transcript. The --

DR. ZIEMER: So the health physicist is using --

MR. ALLEN: It's the completed --

DR. ZIEMER: -- the summary -- the completed summary report. 

MR. ALLEN: Yes, it's the completed one. In item (b) I 

think it's -- I think the difference is it's kind of a 

draft at that point. It hasn't been reviewed. It 

could possibly change for grammar, et cetera. Does 

that make any sense? 

MS. MUNN: Uh-huh, yeah. 

DR. ANDRADE: Yeah, it's a little confusing, but --

MR. ALLEN: Yes, it is. 

DR. ANDRADE: -- recall that the health physicist himself 

can review this first report that comes down to him, 

which is still basically a summary report, and still 

ask for more information and really actually ask for a 

re-interview if necessary. 

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MR. ALLEN: Right, but the difference at this point is (b) 

is before the claimant ever sees it. After that 

review, then it goes to the claimant, the claimant can 

make any changes he wants to. In (c) the claimant's 

already seen it, has made any changes they want to, and 

the dose reconstructionist is the one looking at it. 

DR. ANDRADE: So if the health physicist -- if the health 

physicist has a question and say brings up a small 

technical point that needs to be clarified, and that 

may require an interview again or may need some 

clarification from other people that have listened in, 

then what is it called? 

MR. ALLEN: At that point, if we were to call the claimant 

back again or get a letter or whatever from the 

claimant to change anything, we change it and it's an 

updated summary report, is what we call it. 

DR. ZIEMER: But for practical purposes, it's the completed 

summary report --

MR. ALLEN: Completed summary --

DR. ZIEMER: -- or completed interview report. Is that the 

same as --

MR. ALLEN: Yeah, there's very little -- the semantics 

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aren't too --

DR. ZIEMER: I think we understand it then. 

MR. OWENS: And I didn't intend to do anything --

MR. ALLEN: In any case we'll get the right seman-- the 

right titles --

DR. ZIEMER: We'd better vote before... Are you now ready 

to vote? And because of the previous vote, you 

recognize -- and I'm recommending that those who voted 

for the prior motion not vote against the document 

because of the presence of the last two sentences, 

recognizing that the record will indicate that there 

was a sort of split on the issue of the last two 

sentences, but the rest of the document perhaps could -

- not that the Chair's trying to influence anybody, but 

we -- we don't want to throw everything out, if 

possible. We need the rest of the document, so --

MR. PRESLEY: Clarification? 

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

MR. PRESLEY: Last paragraph, third line, "At this time the 

working group", should we not change the working group 

to Board? 

DR. ZIEMER: That's a good point. I think a friendly 

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amendment here needs to be made. Does the subcommittee 

(sic) agree? It now is a recommendation of the Board, 

not the subcommittee. 

MR. ELLIOTT: And also up in the first sentence. 

DR. MELIUS: And the first sentence should read the same, 

too. 

MR. PRESLEY: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. 

MR. PRESLEY: Yes, I... 

DR. ZIEMER: Ray, that's the first sentence in the document 

will read -- instead of working group, Advisory Board 

on Radiation and Worker Health, and then the third line 

of the last paragraph, instead of working group will 

read Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. 

Now are we ready to vote? All those who support the 

document, please say aye. 

 (Affirmative responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: Those opposed, no? 

 (No responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: Any abstentions? 

 (No responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: The motion carries. Thank you very much. 

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MR. ELLIOTT: I'd like to thank the working group for their 

efforts on this. 

DR. ZIEMER: Appreciate it. Okay, we're a little over time 

for the break. Let's go ahead and take the break. 

Break till about 3:00, if that's agreeable. 

Let me also ask -- is Cori here? Do we have anyone signed 

up for public comment for this afternoon and how many 

individuals? Two individuals? If the individuals -- I 

want to ask if the individuals -- the public comment 

period is scheduled for 2:45. We can -- we can go 

ahead with that now or we can take the break. It 

depends on whether those individuals need to leave or 

would just as soon have the break themselves right now. 

DR. MELIUS: Let's break and... 

DR. ZIEMER: Patricia Ehlmann and Knute Ringin -- is it 

Ringin? Patricia, are you all right if we go at 3:00 

instead of 2:45? 

MS. EHLMANN: (Off microphone) That's fine. 

DR. ZIEMER: All right. And Knute -- is it Knute? 

MR. RINGIN: (Off microphone) It's Knute. 

DR. ZIEMER: Is that -- is that okay? 

MR. RINGIN: (Off microphone) Sure. 

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DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Then we'll take a 15-minute break. 

Thank you. 

(Whereupon, a recess was taken.) 

PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD
 

DR. ZIEMER: We're going to reconvene and proceed with the 

public comment period. 

We're going to begin with Patricia Erlmann -- do I pronounce 

that correctly? 

MS. EHLMANN: Ehlmann. 

DR. ZIEMER: Ehlmann. 

MS. EHLMANN: It's German. 

DR. ZIEMER: It's a Deutsche name. She's from Wright City, 

Missouri, which is in the St. Louis area, was not able 

to be with the Board when we were in St. Louis, but 

we're pleased that she's able to be here today. 

Patricia, we'll -- if you will use the podium here --

or okay, the mike there is on, that's fine. Thank you. 

(Pause) 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, thank you for your patience. Patricia, 

please proceed. 

MS. EHLMANN: I just want to say that my name's Patricia 

Ehlmann, and my brother and I are survivor claimants 

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for Everett Powers, tracking number 10141, case number 

21496, file number 488092991. My dad was employed at 

Mallinckrodt from the 4th month of 1943 to the 10th 

month of 1966. He started at the St. Louis plant and 

was transferred to Weldon Springs around 1957 when the 

plant opened. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma 

in 1983. His cancer was chemo-resistant, although he 

did have to go through a lot of chemo treatments. 

This type of cancer attacks the bone marrow, so his bones 

disintegrated to the point of vertebrae fractures, 

which were extremely painful. During all of this 

treatment he also had at least two chemical peels of 

his head. As you can see from his picture, he was very 

bald, so he had a lot of skin to come off the top of 

his head. 

This is a terrible ordeal to go through for skin cancers. 

Squamous cell cancer took part of his nose, most of one 

nostril and approximately one-half of his lips. Due to 

the weakness of bone disintegration, he fell one 

morning getting out of bed -- and this was on a 

carpeted floor -- causing a brain hemorrhage for which 

he had brain surgery. So now he had three holes bored 

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in his head. And since this is basically a stroke, he 

had to completely go through therapy to regain speech, 

movement of his arm and his hand. 

My dad smiled all the time, and right up to the time the 

morphine completely knocked him out, he was smiling. 

He died in September of 1987. My mother filed the 

first claim in 2001 and at her passing in September of 

2002, my brother and I sent in claims. 

We're just normal people who know very little about 

government paperwork, and boy, were we in for a shock. 

After finally finding everything we could, with a lot 

of help from Paducah, we were in for another problem. 

The paperwork showed -- proved to the DOL all of the 

cancers that I listed above, but it only showed that he 

worked at the Weldon Spring plant. After many phone 

calls, with the help of Denise Brock, I finally had a 

conference call between myself, Ms. Brock and Jeremy 

Stanton of the DOL. He stated that their paperwork 

showed that he only worked at Destin (sic) in St. 

Louis. Now I mean this is getting crazy. I've got the 

same Department telling me he worked in two different 

places. We need help to resolve this. We're not the 

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only ones with this problem. I have heard of other 

people where the paperwork is not showing where they 

worked. We can't get our interviews. 

We are due an interview now because I know Destin (sic) is 

taking the interviews. He worked there long enough to 

get that interview. And it takes only common sense to 

know that if he started in '43 and he quit in '66, he 

worked at both plants because they weren't in operation 

at the same time. 

Thank you, and I'd appreciate your help. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. I'd like to see if any of the Board 

members have questions for Patricia. 

 (No responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much. Then Knute Ringin, who 

is from Seattle, Washington. Thank you. Knute? 

MR. RINGIN: (Off microphone) Thank you very much for 

allowing me to speak here today. With respect, I'd 

like to ask for equal time (Inaudible) that Richard 

Miller has had in front of you over the last 18 

meetings --

THE COURT REPORTER: Dr. Ziemer, he's not feeding. 

DR. ZIEMER: We need to -- yeah, you may have to -- you may 

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have to do your request over. 

MR. RINGIN: Well, I'll try to keep it a little bit shorter. 

As I said, my name is Knute Ringin and I'm glad to be 

here. I've not bothered you at previous meetings, but 

I think I have enough to talk about now that it's 

worthwhile to take a little bit of your time. 

I am the science advisor to the Center to Protect Workers 

Rights. CPWR is a non-profit research and development 

arm of the National Building Trades department of the 

AFL/CIO. Since I'm going to talk about ethics a little 

later, I would like to make a couple of disclosures to 

begin with. 

First of all, CPWR has a very large, significant and 

longstanding partnership with NIOSH in the area of 

construction safety and health. We also have a 

contract with OCAS to try to develop better dose and 

radiation monitoring estimates for construction 

workers. We're responsible for -- involved in medical 

screening programs for construction workers at Hanford, 

Savannah River, Oak Ridge, Portsmouth, Paducah and 

Amchitka. And in the course of the last six years, 

we've probably interviewed more than 10,000 workers in 

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those sites. 

We also have a contract that DOL just asked us to take on to 

help them establish employment verification where DOE 

cannot verify that a worker has been employed at a DOE 

site. For construction workers, that's close to 20 

percent. That's 20 percent where DOE does not have 

employment history, let alone radiation dose monitoring 

history. 

Now I'm not an expert on radiation, and I don't come here to 

talk to you really about radiation, radiation 

monitoring or radiation biology. My comments are 

specifically limited to construction workers, which we 

represent and which I know something about, and to the 

claimants who are construction workers. My comments 

may or may not be relevant for other types of 

claimants, but they're relevant for those workers who 

come as construction workers and who have some unique 

characteristics. 

The first is, they're all employed intermittently at DOE 

facilities. The second is that they're working largely 

in uncharacterized or inadequately-characterized 

environments. And the third is that they work under 

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uncontrolled working conditions with little or no 

supervision most of the time. 

Now these workers happen to have a large stake in your 

program that you're reviewing. There've been many more 

construction workers at DOE facilities than production 

workers, which most people don't realize. For 

instance, at Hanford we estimate there are 59,000 

construction workers at risk for radiation exposure; 

37,000 at Savannah River; more than 30,000 at Oak 

Ridge. And roughly half of the current claimants in 

your program are construction workers or their 

survivors, so it's not going to be an incidental issue 

to your deliberations. 

We're grateful that NIOSH is finally starting to process 

cases. It's obviously long overdue. We're deeply 

concerned about that because we hear it from our 

members all the time. But the 1,000 cases processed so 

far cannot be used to est-- make any kind of 

determination or estimate about what this program is, 

should or will do in the future. So far what you've 

seen are the easy, the straightforward cases mostly; 

the ones who are obviously yes or obviously no and that 

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have been processed pretty fast. What I'm concerned 

about is the 30 or 40 percent of our members where 

there are no valid dose data and where claimants have 

difficulty recalling their work history for you, and 

that's a large number of them. 

Let me also say from the start that we did not agree with 

NIOSH's interpretation of the law and its plans for 

dose reconstructions, and we've had many discussions 

with the NIOSH management about that, with Larry and so 

on. We didn't think that this approach was going to 

work for our members, and so far we don't see much 

evidence that it is. The problems that we look at here 

can be traced to two fundamental flaws in the way that 

I think the program has been set up. 

For claimants like ours who have problems with dose 

information, the original dose reconstruction rule 

under which the program operates is extremely lacking 

in specification. It's fairly specific when it comes 

to dealing with workers who have dose, and then it has 

two very general paragraphs dealing with workers who 

don't have dose, where they say we may either 

extrapolate from workers similarly situated, or we may 

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use some other kinds of environmental data. That's 

essentially all the dose reconstruction rule says. And 

it doesn't give us enough specificity to determine with 

accuracy two major effects. 

Because we don't have defined benchmarks, it's difficult --

maybe even impossible -- to make an objective 

determination about the completeness of the dose 

reconstruction once it's done. I don't know what we 

would compare it against for these workers. And 

secondly, it ends up placing what I think is an 

unreasonable burden on the claimants to document their 

exposures and to verify the completeness of the dose 

reconstruction once it's done. These workers need 

help, and I'll get back to that. 

And the second very big flaw in the program that you all are 

very aware of is that the administrative structure now 

is so rife with potential for conflict of interest that 

it's at this point eroded to a great extent the 

confidence in NIOSH's objectivity, particularly 

confidence among our claimants, our members who are 

claimants. And we hear it every day. 

And it comes largely from two -- there are two effects that 

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arise from this structure. Even though policies and 

procedures to prevent conflicts of interest have been 

developed, we're already seeing evidence that they're 

not adequate -- at least I think we're seeing that. 

And as a result of this, as I said, NIOSH has a low 

level of credibility among claimants that it definitely 

has to overcome. And I think the role of this Board is 

incredibly important to establish credibility for this 

program. That's why we have this review. And not just 

to review what is being done, but to review it in such 

a way that you re-establish credibility in the program 

as it goes forward. 

I want to put this in context by using the Savannah River 

Site history profile as an example. My comments will 

reflect a meeting that we had in August on November 11 

where Jim Neton and four contractors came to review the 

site profile document with local unions, and we 

appreciate that he came there on a Federal holiday, 

which was the only time when we could get everybody 

together. And everybody that was -- there were 18 

local union leaders, the leaders of every union that 

represents workers at Savannah River. We also had a 

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dozen or so workers who spanned the entire history of 

the Savannah River Site, who had spent considerable 

time there, to talk about their experience. And we had 

three technical experts. In addition to myself we had 

Jim Platner* who is a Ph.D. radiation biologist and Don 

Ellisberg who's a lawyer with great knowledge about 

workers comp and who was in charge of all of the 

Workers Compensation programs at the Department of 

Labor in the past. So we provided this kind of 

expertise and we had a very good meeting with Jim Neton 

and his staff. 

In fact, I would say that's by far the best meeting that 

we've had with NIOSH on this program because it was a 

very open give or take where they said this is what 

we've done; do you think it's adequate, is it going to 

work for your members and what can we do better, and we 

talked about some of those things. And I'm going to 

talk to you -- show you a little bit about what we told 

them so that you understand why it's important to look 

more carefully at these documents. 

I appreciate the complexity of trying to characterize 50 

years of production at Savannah River in a short 

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document. Anybody who's been at the Savannah River 

Site or Hanford or Oak Ridge or INEEL will know that 

these are incredibly complicated sites, and here we 

have a document where the text is basically 100 or so 

pages and a bunch of appendices attached to that that's 

supposed to somehow explain everything that's happened 

in terms of radiation to those workers who were there. 

That's a monumental task and a very difficult one and 

a very important one. 

Yet in the end of this, we still have to ask this very basic 

question. The document that comes out, which ends up 

being a summary, a distillation of all kinds of stuff, 

does it end up being fair to the claimants. Is this a 

document fair to all of the claimants, given that there 

all kinds of different classes of claimants who have 

been workers who it's supposed to cover. 

I don't know if it's fair to ask you all, but how many of 

you have read the Savannah River site profile document? 

Yes, I don't blame you if you haven't. It's not easy 

reading. It's a very dense and complicated document 

that at least it's taken me a long time to get through. 

And now we have many more of these things to go 

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through, and I'll get back to why that's also at issue. 

The Savannah River Site history was issued in the summer of 

-- during summer of 2003, but we didn't know it until 

actually your meeting in August, I believe, when it was 

announced. We were not aware that it was being 

developed or that it had been issued. And although we 

can't be completely sure of this since we don't have 

quite an accurate or at least consistent description of 

what it's going to be used for, we think this is 

probably a very important document, that all of these 

site profile documents are probably very important. 

Our impression is that it's been developed pursuant to 

the dose reconstruction rule with a purpose of, to 

quote the document itself, "to evaluate both internal 

and external dosimetry data for unmonitored and 

monitored workers" -- sounds like pretty much 

everybody, I guess -- "and to serve as a supplement to 

or substitute for individual monitoring data". That's 

a very large charge to this document, not very 

specific, and we'll only learn how it'll be used as it 

gets implemented. 

When we reviewed this document we became very concerned for 

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five basic reasons. There really isn't a methodology 

in this document. If we were to try to reconstruct 

this document, we would not be able to do so 

accurately, I don't think. I don't think we'd come up 

with the same result. And if there's any basic issue 

in science, it has to be replicability. In order to 

get to replicability, you've got to have a method and 

you've got to have documentation that you can follow, 

and that documentation and method is not sufficient to 

do that. 

The report doesn't describe the methods or documentation 

adequately. And as I said, as a result of this, it's 

not possible -- I don't think -- to replicate it. But 

we know it was done by an ORAU contractor team that 

talked and spent lots of hours with site personnel at 

Savannah River and used largely internal documents from 

the Savannah River Site, without specifying necessarily 

why, whom or when they talked to these people. So we 

don't have the documentation about exactly what was 

done. And that doesn't give us a lot of comfort in the 

process. 

For instance, the contractor has developed a methodology for 

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extrapolating maximum dose from source terms, and 

that's used to estimate exposure from the airborne and 

resuspended I guess exposures. This methodology is 

listed in the bibliography, but it's only listed as an 

unpublished document that was prepared by the 

contractor for the purpose of doing this project. So 

until one has that document and reviews it, you can't 

understand what's been done in the report itself. It 

becomes a little bit of a house of cards. 

There seems to be some significant omissions, as near as we 

can tell. Now we based our review on this on a very 

large site history inventory that we've developed at 

the University of Cincinnati, and Dr. Eula Bingham has 

that, as well as approximately 2,000 interviews with 

workers -- construction workers who have been at 

Savannah River, and here is what we found that's 

significant. 

We found that we have 83 significant site history documents 

that are not in -- referenced in this document and I 

don't think have been used. Secondly, we looked at one 

specific area, which is the area that's common to all 

of the reactors used at Savannah River and there NIOSH 

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lists that there are 32 core radionuclides, yet we have 

identified at least ten additional radionuclides. And 

if you're looking for source terms to extrapolate from, 

then I think it's important to include all of those. 

Maybe we missed something, I don't know, but that's 

what we think is there. 

There's virtually no description of deficiencies in 

radiation monitoring programs. If you read this 

document, you would think that radiation monitoring at 

Savannah River had been just about perfect from the 

start. That's not what our workers, our members, tell 

us in the interviews that we have done and that we can 

document. There was extensive testimony also on 

problems in monitoring practices when DOE held town 

meetings in Aiken in 1999 in development of this 

program, and that's not at all referenced, or I don't 

think has been reviewed in the process of developing 

this document. Also the tiger teams that did their 

investigations of Savannah River in 1990 documented 

very extensive deficiencies in monitoring practices, 

and they're not listed. 

There is no consideration of radiation incidents or 

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accidents, as near as I could tell. We've identified 

approximately 76 accidents over the history of the site 

that we do not see referenced in this report, and that 

I believe are important if you're going to look at 

exposures. 

Throughout the document there is no apparent awareness that 

construction workers may have very different exposure 

patterns from production workers. For instance, in 

applying the model for extrapolation from source term 

to resuspended radiation, there is no consideration of 

something as simple as digging in the dirt. Somehow 

it's assumed that that dirt's not going to be disturbed 

very much. I don't know where -- how these resuspended 

-- this resuspended radiation is going to become 

airborne again, but there certainly isn't taken into 

account that it might be a source of exposure for 

people who dig in it, which just about all construction 

workers do from time to time on these sites. 

The third concern that we have is one that we take very 

seriously, and I'm sure you do, and I don't like it. 

There is a guy named Dr. Eugene Rollins who's listed on 

the ORAU web site as the key -- as a key person working 

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on this report. He apparently also developed the model 

to estimate maximum dose from source terms, an 

important internal report that is referenced 

extensively in the document itself. According to his 

conflict of interest statement that's also listed on 

the ORAU site, it says that he previously worked at 

Savannah River, including six years in human health 

risk assessment and one year as a shift supervisor in 

health physics and radiation monitoring. Now I'm not 

saying that that leads to a conflict of interest by 

itself, but I believe according to the policies on 

conflict of interest, people who have worked on sites 

should not be working in these documents, and that's at 

least what the folks who came down to Savannah River 

told us, that was their intent. So that's something 

that has to be looked at very carefully because it gets 

at the heart of this credibility problem. 

The fourth concern we have is a minor one, but it's 

technically important, and that is that we think 

there's a conflict with the dose reconstruction rule in 

this document. There's a small throw-away thing in 

there somewhere about a curious minor adjustment to 

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dose for claimants who eat wild game taken in the 

Savannah River area. Now I don't know what the 

implications are of this adjustment, but I do know 

this: According to the dose reconstruction rule, it 

allows for only one adjustment to dose -- we've talked 

about this many times -- and that's for smoking in lung 

cancer. NIOSH agreed from the start that it would not 

make any of the adjustments, for instance, that NCI 

suggested for diet and that has been used in some of 

the other radiation reconstruction programs. And I 

believe that's included -- at least it's an intent of 

the dose reconstruction rule that that should not be 

included, yet there is a conflict here that I think is 

a technicality, but that could be important. That is 

that if a document is to be developed pursuant to the 

dose reconstruction rule, then it should follow the 

rule itself. 

Finally, there is no independent review of these documents, 

as far as I know. Before this document was put on the 

web and issued for use, there was no review of the 

underlying methodology, and in this case the 

unpublished source terms extrapolation method, and 

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there was no independent review of the document itself. 

Now follow our meeting with the folks in August with NIOSH, 

we agreed to make available to NIOSH all the 

documentation that we have, and we would have done that 

a long time ago had they asked us. I don't know why 

they didn't come to us when they were developing the 

report, and it seems that this is particularly serious 

given that they obviously didn't hesitate to meet with 

the DOE site personnel. The one-sidedness of this kind 

of contact does nothing to dispel the sense held 

broadly that NIOSH is not particularly aboveboard in 

its work. 

Now we have good reason at Savannah River to be concerned 

when you just deal with stuff that the site 

administration gives you. When we started our medical 

monitoring program at Savannah River, the site strongly 

objected to us testing people for beryllium exposure. 

They said there had absolutely never been any beryllium 

used at that site, and they said the same thing to 

NIOSH. After having tested some 2,000 people or so 

down there, we have about one and a half percent of the 

workers who have been there testing positive on DOE's 

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recommended beryllium test. And upon those initial 

findings, the site administration finally 'fessed up 

and said yeah, there may have been a little beryllium 

here after all. So it's not comforting to say that 

it's enough to go to the site administration and ask 

what kind of documentation do you have; just give us 

your stuff or tell us what you've been doing and we'll 

make use of that. I'm not very comfortable with it. 

Finally, let me also make a point about our claimants that 

I've made many times before. After the site -- NIOSH 

placed the site profile document on its web site, it 

invited comment on it, which one can discover by 

reading the web site. Apart from this being after the 

horse left the barn, so to speak -- the document had 

already been issued -- it clearly places the burden on 

the claimants to show that there are deficiencies in 

this document. And that points to me to what seems to 

be a very unfair balancing act. On the one hand we 

have the site profile reports. These are very complex 

documents, presumably with far-reaching significance, 

presented very much or pretty much as final by NIOSH 

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house expertise, vast resources through its 

subcontracts and so on, to put into the preparation of 

this thing. On the other side are the claimants. Now 

these are, by definition, either workers with cancer or 

their survivors. They're mostly old and frail, and 

they have no support. And they're expected to 

challenge these documents and to say hey, we don't 

think there's -- there are problems with this dose 

recon-- or with this site profile that you've done. 

That's an unreasonable burden to place on them, because 

if they don't challenge it right now, NIOSH will do 

nothing to change these documents. 

This is not the only burden (sic) where NIOSH places an 

undue burden on claimants. You talked about the 

interviews earlier today, and I can safely say that our 

members tell us that they have trouble following the 

interviews that are done by phone, and many of the 

NIOSH interviewers have said the same thing. It's 

unreasonable to expect these old construction workers 

to recall a lifetime of information about radiation 

exposure. But much more difficult are the interviews 

with survivors, and they're close to half of the 

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claimants here. I believe that the NIOSH interviewers 

agree that they get very little or nothing out of most 

of the interviews that they do with survivors. 

Based on this, I would ask this Board to do three things, or 

consider doing three things. One is to recommend NIOSH 

that it issues a replicable method for the preparation 

of the site profiles, and that this includes validation 

of the information that it receives from the sites, 

validation both in terms of the accuracy of what it 

receives and whether it's complete. 

Secondly, recommend or require that independent review of 

these site profiles be conducted before they're issued 

-- and I was going to call this peer review, but I'm 

not comfortable with that term in this context because 

peer review might simply mean a health physics review, 

and I think there's something much more important. 

It's not just understanding health physics, but it's 

also understanding how it applies to workers as they do 

their work on these sites. 

And thirdly, I would encourage NIOSH to provide claimants 

who want it or need it with much more independent 

assistance with their interactions with NIOSH. NIOSH 

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wants to be claimant-friendly. The site profile 

document uses this word extensively. But it fails to 

provide the weakest of claimants what they most need, 

which is an independent, knowledgeable and forceful 

advocate in the process of doing all of this work, and 

it's certainly something that we would like to work on. 

And in addition, if I may be so bold, once you hold these 

meetings in the future, I suggest that you make two 

minor changes, particularly when you're planning to 

hold your meetings in the tri-cities and in Augusta. 

First send out a notice to all the claimants who live 

in that general vicinity, say within a radius of 50 or 

80 miles or something like that, informing them that 

you're going to hold this meeting. We will certainly 

be glad to notify everybody in our programs about it. 

And in addition, hold an evening session for public 

comment, maybe on the first day of the meeting, because 

most people will not come to a day meeting for two very 

significant reasons. Either they're very old or frail 

claimants -- whether they're the workers or their 

survivors -- and they usually need help to come to 

meetings and they rely on their kids or something like 

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that, and those kids are working. Or they're 

survivors, who usually are also working, they're the 

children and is the one who have jobs themselves and 

can't get away during the day, so maybe a two-hour 

evening session would be, I think, very enlightening to 

you. At least if you come to Hanford. I'm sure you'll 

get an earful. 

And with that, I thank you for your time and your attention. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Knute. Let me ask if any of the 

Board members have questions they may wish to address 

to you before you leave the podium. Any points of 

clarification? Henry? 

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah, what -- what kind of follow-up have you 

had from NIOSH after your meeting in Augusta --

MR. RINGIN: Well --

DR. ANDERSON: -- (Inaudible) made your other 

recommendations as --

DR. ANDERSON: -- Larry called us about a week afterwards 

and we had a conversation where he asked us to submit 

all of our information and documentation, which we were 

planning to do anyway, and which we've started doing 

earlier than we had planned to do it so that we're 

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providing them information initially on Hanford, 

Savannah River, Amchitka in Alaska and the Nevada Test 

Site and Oak Ridge, and that includes all of the 

information that we have in our site history 

repository, as well as all of the results that we have 

from the -- from the interviews with workers. 

I can also say to you that doing interviews with workers, 

particularly construction workers, is very difficult. 

It took us a long time to learn how to do it, even 

though we're kind of specialists on construction 

workers, that unless you put it in terms that they're 

used to, occupational terms -- you know, the kind of 

tasks that they do and that kind of stuff -- we don't 

typically get very far with it. If you put it in terms 

that they understand -- we use retired construction 

workers to do those interviews for that reason -- then 

we get a lot of information. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Other -- here's another question, 

Rich Espinosa. 

MR. ESPINOSA: You had mentioned 20 percent of the 

construction workers that are claimants haven't been 

able to verify employment. How is... 

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MR. RINGIN: When the Labor Department gets a claim, it 

sends it -- along with a form called the EE-5 form --

to the local Department of Energy site where the worker 

has been working. Our in our -- for our workers, you 

know, there are many different sites. The DOE facility 

is then supposed to establish whether or not they have 

records indicating that this person was an employee on 

their site. For construction workers, in about 20 

percent of the claims that DOE site that they send that 

record to is unable to verify in its documentation --

one of the problems is that a lot of our members have 

been employed by subcontractors and sub-sub tiers of 

contractors, and it becomes -- having records. Now 

there should be records somewhere. It's -- you know, 

you're required to submit certified payroll records 

every week or month on all of these workers, so 

somewhere it should be, but they are unable to come up 

with it in a timely fashion. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Other questions? 

MR. ESPINOSA: I got... 

DR. ZIEMER: Oh, a follow-up. Okay. 

MR. ESPINOSA: One of the things that concerns me, 

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especially when it comes to the SEC, is the co-worker 

data, such as if they didn't have enough data for me, 

they're going to use a co-worker. You mentioned some 

stuff on service workers and construction workers where 

they're coming out with two different -- quite -- quite 

a bit difference in their dose reconstructions. Can 

you go a little bit further on that, please? 

MR. RINGIN: I'm glad you bring up -- actually didn't think 

I'd prompted you to ask these questions, but I had --

the question about extrapolating from co-workers to coworker is very, very difficult for construction 

workers. We've been spending years trying to come up 

with predictable models for exposures for workers doing 

similar kinds of tasks. Bob Herrick* -- who many of 

you know at Harvard -- has worked with us in a working 

group, and we spent I think two years doing -- just 

reviewing workers who were doing turnkey maintenance 

construction on cold-fired utility boilers, thinking 

that that is a very similar kind of exposure. And we 

went in there, he did measurements on a lot of these 

different sites, and all we got was a variance that was 

so great that we couldn't draw conclusions from it. So 

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we couldn't come up with a statistically predictable 

model for -- for exposures. And my guess is that 

that's going to be somewhat similar for radiation. 

I can also comment a little bit -- unless I'm over-extending 

my time here -- one of the problems of the way that DOE 

had characterized its work sites, and I think that the 

beryllium example is a good one, both for Hanford and 

for Savannah River. The belief was that construction 

workers wouldn't have been exposed to beryllium because 

construction workers don't work with beryllium. And 

DOE had characterized the environments where beryllium 

may have been. They'd done wipe samples and that kind 

of stuff. But after we got all these results on -- at 

Hanford, for instance, three to four percent of the 

workers testing positive on the beryllium lymphocyte 

proliferation test, we started to go back and look at 

how they had been sampling and estimating environment. 

And in those buildings they did the wipe sampling up 

to eight feet on the -- on the walls. They'd not done 

sampling in the rafters, not above ceiling tiles, not 

behind wall panels or in subflooring or crawl spaces. 

Well, that's where most construction workers do their 

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work. Most construction workers don't do new 

construction. Just about all the construction work 

that's done now is either repair, maintenance, 

renovation, demolition or decontamination, and that's 

where they probably get most of these exposures. And 

they're exposures that are very hard to predict because 

the environment isn't anticipated and the work that 

they're doing isn't anticipated. I don't know if that 

answered your question --

MR. ESPINOSA: Yeah, that answered my question. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Other questions or comments? Thank 

you, Knute, for your input to the Board. 

We've come to the completion of today's agenda. We begin 

tomorrow morning again at 8:00 o'clock in terms of the 

informal time together, and then the official business 

beginning at 8:30. 

Let me pause and see if we have any housekeeping items, 

Cori, tonight to address? No. 

MS. HOMER: The only thing I would suggest is that if you 

have anything in the room, take it with you. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Don't leave things in this room over --

overnight. They're -- they will become part of David 

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Brenner's comedy act. 

With that, we'll recess till tomorrow morning. Thank you 

very much. 

(Whereupon, an adjournment was taken to Wednesday, December 

10, 2003 at 8:00 a.m.) 

DECEMBER 10, 2003
 

P R O C E E D I N G S
 

REGISTRATION AND WELCOME 

DR. ZIEMER: Good morning, everyone. Again I'll call the 

meeting back to order, the second session of the 

nineteenth meeting of the Advisory Board on Radiation 

and Worker Health. Again I remind you if you have not 

registered your attendance at this meeting, please do 

so at the -- the books are out on the table at the 

entryway. Also, members of the public who wish to 

address the Board, please sign up in the sign-up book 

that also is at the entryway. 

Again remind everyone that there are other documents and 

handouts on the table here to my left. Please avail 

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yourselves of those, as you might find it helpful. 

Many of you are aware -- perhaps all of you are aware --

that the Board has been seeking contract support for 

assistance in auditing the dose reconstruction process 

and related matters. The firm that was the successful 

bidder was Sanford Cohen & Associates, and from that 

company we have this morning with us Dr. John Mauro, 

who's going to give us a general briefing about their 

company. 

I want to point out both to those here on the -- at the 

podium or -- in other words, the Board members as well 

as those in the audience, that this presentation and 

discussion this morning is very general. The Board has 

yet to review in closed session the document which is 

proprietary which will be addressed this afternoon, the 

task orders and the independent government cost 

estimate for that support, so the Board will be looking 

at that in detail this afternoon. But basically this 

morning we're introducing John and the company to the 

Board and to the public. So John, we're pleased to 

have you here this morning, and if you would give us an 

overview of your organization and related matters. 

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Question? 

MR. GRIFFON: Just a question before we start. Is -- can we 

discuss or ask John questions regarding the technical 

skill proposal or --

DR. ZIEMER: I'm going to ask Martha to address that. My 

understanding now is that in fact that is still 

restricted information until the Board has discussed 

the proposal, so that that may be off-bounds. But 

we'll ask Martha -- if you would, Martha -- to address 

that for us and give us a legal opinion here. 

MS. DIMUZIO: We did speak with contracts about this, and 

basically what we have is we have a document that's 

before the government for its consideration, so it's 

not really a public document until a final award has 

been made. So when Dr. Mauro is giving his 

presentation, you can ask general questions about 

anything, but we cannot have any specific discussions 

about the proposal that he's submitted or the 

approaches that SC&A may be taking in -- in their 

approach to completing those tasks. That's really 

discussion for this afternoon in the closed session. 

It's a -- the document is not a public document at this 

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point. It's a document before the government for 

consideration, so --

MR. GRIFFON: And SCA can't be in the closed session. Is 

that correct? 

MS. DIMUZIO: That's correct. 

MR. GRIFFON: So we -- I mean I'm not sure how we'd 

negotiate or discuss technical scope with the 

contractor if --

MS. DIMUZIO: Basically what we would be developing is we 

would be developing questions that would be referred to 

SC&A for them to respond to. I mean that's how it 

would work. 

DR. ZIEMER: And understand that this has a practical effect 

of perhaps stretching things out a little bit because -

- but SCA then has a right, as I understand it, to have 

a certain amount of time to respond to questions that 

are raised. They are not -- we don't sit there in the 

room and ask them to respond right at that moment. We 

have to develop --

MS. DIMUZIO: Right, within the --

DR. ZIEMER: -- both the technical and the cost-related 

questions and then go back to them then, is my 

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understanding. 

MS. DIMUZIO: Right, within the scope of the contract, SC&A 

has seven days to respond to those questions, so... 

MR. ELLIOTT: It's also a redirection, too. If the Board 

finds in the technical proposal that the contractor is 

proposing something beyond or -- or outside of what the 

scope of the task called for, you can redirect, by 

comment. And so that -- that, you know, of itself is -

- as well as the questions that you formulate, are --

are confidential --

MS. DIMUZIO: Right. 

MR. ELLIOTT: -- in nature. 

MS. DIMUZIO: We can't appear to be leading -- we cannot 

appear to be leading the contractor to arrive at a 

certain point. It's more of a direct -- you know, we 

have these questions and it's -- you know, it is 

basically that negotiation back and forth, so that's 

done in closed session. 

DR. ZIEMER: So those are kind of the ground rules on which 

we need to operate this morning. Let me ask, any --

everybody on the Board understand that? 

MR. MILLER: Excuse me, Dr. Ziemer. 

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DR. ZIEMER: Yes, sir? 

MR. MILLER: Could I just raise a question on this? Is 

there a practical way to solve this? Because the 

technical scope of what the audit is going to be is of 

significant public interest. We're not interested in 

the money side, you know, the independent government 

cost estimate part. But it seems to me if there's a 

practical way to solve this would be if the -- if NIOSH 

would make available the accepted bid proposal that was 

submitted with Sanford Cohen & Associates' original bid 

that was made to the government that was accepted, I 

presume, by the -- whatever source evaluation board you 

had, so that there's some sense about what the 

structure, the organization, the methods that are going 

to be used, the approaches, what the -- what the items 

are that they're even going to do. I mean to --

DR. ZIEMER: Well --

MR. MILLER: -- to -- to go into secret --

DR. ZIEMER: Let me --

MR. MILLER: -- and to have discussion about what those 

items are --

DR. ZIEMER: I understand your point, Richard --

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MR. MILLER: -- without any public --

DR. ZIEMER: -- but let me -- let me point out to you that 

the scope of the work has been defined by the Board. 

That is a public document. Our determination is 

whether or not this company is responsive to our scope 

and what the costs will be to carry that work out. So 

the scope is public. We have several tasks. They have 

been defined. We have to determine whether or not this 

company is in fact capable of responding to those 

tasks. You will hear about the organization of the 

company and their personnel. 

The question on the original proposal, I don't know the 

legal answer to that. I -- it's a procurement issue. 

Perhaps Martha can speak to that. 

MS. DIMUZIO: We did pose this specific question to our 

procurement office about is there any way that the 

proposal as it's been submitted can be supplied to the 

public, and basically at this point it's through a 

Freedom of Information request that would be considered 

by the procurement office as to whether or not the 

document is releasable, working with Sanford Cohen to 

make that determination whether or not anything within 

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that proposal was proprietary or so forth. 

But I think it's important to point out that while SC&A may 

have developed an approach and everything, not that 

there's anything wrong with that approach, but it may 

not be the approach that the Board wants. And so I 

think we need to, you know, have that discussion --

that's a discussion that needs to be held in private, 

whether or not the way Sanford Cohen has determined to 

approach the work that needs to be done is the way that 

the Board intended it to be. I mean that's one of the 

issues for the session, the closed session, is to 

evaluate how their approach has --

DR. ZIEMER: Is the issue of the original document, is that 

being pursued or does that require a specific FOIA 

request? 

MS. DIMUZIO: That would require a specific FOIA request for 

the original document, as it stands now. 

DR. ZIEMER: I think we were referring to the proposal that 

MS. DIMUZIO: Oh --

DR. ZIEMER: -- Cohen originally submitted, which I believe 

does contain some proprietary information. 

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MS. DIMUZIO: As a part of the contract submittal? 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: Originally. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I think that's what we're -- they're referring 

to. 

MS. DIMUZIO: That would be -- yeah -- I need to go back and 

-- and speak with the procurement office, but I believe 

if Sanford Cohen is willing to release that 

information, that that information could be released, 

yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: We will follow-up on that. You know, I don't 

want to get into that debate right now, but we -- note 

is taken of that, Richard. We'll see if it can be 

released --

MR. MILLER: Just to be --

DR. ZIEMER: -- at some point. 

MR. MILLER: -- clear, though, that proposal that Martha was 

referring to, the original proposal, was incorporated 

by reference, I believe, in the final contract award 

that NIOSH posted. 

SANFORD COHEN & ASSOCIATES BRIEFING
 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Okay. With that introduction, 

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here's John. 

DR. MAURO: Good morning. I'd like to thank you for 

inviting me. 

DR. ZIEMER: Wait, John, you need to put it --

DR. MAURO: A little higher? Okay, is that a little better? 

Again, thank you for inviting me. I'm glad to be here 

today. As was mentioned, SC&A was selected -- I guess 

it was back in October -- to provide technical support 

to the Advisory Board in fulfilling its mandate under 

the Act. 

In November basically we were awarded what's called a task 

order proposal, which means that from time to time the 

Board would request SC&A to perform certain tasks. We 

received our first task order request for proposal in 

November and we recently -- last week -- submitted our 

technical proposals to the Board. As they mentioned, 

they're reviewing that. 

I'm here today primarily to introduce SC&A, who we are --

we're a small company -- and to identi-- let you know 

our scope of work, what we've been asked to -- to do. 

And also give you the brief overview of some of the 

people that are on our team and their backgrounds. 

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Okay, SC&A. We're a small company, do about $5 million a 

year in work, and we primarily -- we were incorporated 

in 1982. Sandy Cohen is a personal friend of mine. 

I've been working with him now for -- since 1986, and 

we specialize in doing dose calculations. We're 

nuclear engineers and health physicists, primarily. 

We have currently 30 employees and we have 50 associates. 

We have a way of doing business whereby we have a core 

group of people that are more senior, like myself, and 

then we have associates that work with us who are 

specialists in a wide variety of areas that we bring in 

to work on particular problems as they arise. So in 

effect, we -- and this is a -- this is a very effective 

approach in providing technical consultant services in 

that we can bring the best people in the world to -- to 

the table to -- to answer very specific questions. And 

also it allows us not to carry a large overhead, so we 

-- what this -- it puts us in the position that we can 

bring the best people at the lowest price. 

And we work -- we have our headquarters office in McLean, 

Virginia, but our -- a lot of our people work out of a 

virtual office. For example, I work out of my home in 

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Red Bank, New Jersey. 

Our clients currently are government clients, primarily. We 

do a lot of work for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 

the Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for 

Disease Control, FEMA and DARPA. We -- we write 

reports. We write new reg documents. We write -- for 

EPA we write baseline risk assessments, technical 

support documents. Dose reconstructions, we've done a 

lot of work for CDC for off-site dose reconstruction. 

We've done -- so we do dose assessment, risk --

radiological risk assessment primarily for the 

government and primarily for agencies that regulate DOE 

-- so it's, you know -- so we -- I guess one of the 

reasons for our selection is that as a corporation we 

really are not tied very closely at all to DOE. We're 

more closely tied to EPA, NRC, Defense Nuclear 

Facilities Safety Board, folks that regulate Department 

of Energy. 

However, we do have a -- we have a laboratory, and our 

laboratory does radiological analysis of samples from 

anyone that sends us -- that wants us to do, and we are 

doing some work from samples that come from the State 

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of New Jersey, but also from Savannah River, from -- I 

guess it's CH (Inaudible) out at Rocky Flats, so that -

- that really is the place where we're -- we're doing 

some work for DOE through our laboratory analysis. 

By and large, we're a consulting company to government 

agencies, and I'm proud to say now we are working for 

NIOSH, also. 

Our organization -- we have a simple organization. The 

president and owner of the company is Dr. Sanford 

Cohen. He's a Ph.D. nuclear engineer. He started the 

company in 1982, and he is a personal friend of mine. 

And he in fact will be the back-up. If for any reason 

-- I got eaten by an alligator or whatever -- Sandy is 

my back-up on this project. I'm the project manager. 

The person -- our chief operating officer, Greg Beronja, 

he's there to make sure we make money. He -- he runs 

the operations. He has a -- he's a chemical engineer 

with an MBA. 

But then the -- really the heart, the operation where -- the 

people in the trenches are these four boxes. We have 

four divisions in the company. The original company 

that was doing lots of work for NRC and EPA is now 

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called the consulting division. I head the consulting 

division. That division, as I said earlier, consists 

of anywhere -- at any point in time, between 10 to 20 

people doing -- writing new reg documents and other 

types of paper (Inaudible) newspaper. 

We have -- the other division is the laboratory, and they do 

radiological analysis. Their specialty is 

transuranics. 

We have a field division, folks that go out -- and this is a 

relatively new division. They go out and perform 

measurements. If you folks are familiar with 

characterization and close-out surveys, Bill Ulicny is 

-- leads up that division and it's a -- it's just a 

start-up operation. We have a few -- a few private 

clients. 

And finally we have what's called the quality assurance 

division, another smaller division within the company, 

and Patrick Kelly heads that up and he does audits. 

Right now he's doing some audits related to I guess 

(inaudible) whereby these waste packages are being 

produced and -- for -- for disposal and there's very 

formal auditing process to make sure those packages 

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meet certain criteria. We drafted Patrick to help out 

a bit 'cause that's what he does, audits, and -- but --

but all of the work that will be done in this project 

is going to be done out of my division, consulting 

division. 

I put up the organization chart -- we'll talk about the 

individuals, and it's probably hard for you to read 

anyway. I should have made it a little larger. But 

the concept of operations, the way we organize 

ourselves, is that I -- I'm the project manager and I 

will be available to this project full time, if 

necessary. I'm here at -- to serve the -- the Board. 

I have been -- I'm a key individual on the project. I 

cannot be replaced unless written authorized approval 

by the Board. I re-- and I report to the Board. 

Probably there's also an administrative relationship 

between the Board and NIOSH, but my understanding is 

that I will be reporting to you folks and to get all my 

direction from you folks. 

I have a deputy project manager, Joe Fitzgerald. Some of 

you folks may know him. He has a lot of background at 

the Department of Energy. He has an indep-- he has his 

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own company. We brought Joe's company, Salient, in as 

a subcontractor to SC&A. 

You'll see, as we go over the backgrounds of these folks 

here, we -- we have -- we've done a lot of off-site 

dose reconstruction for CDC. We've done a lot of risk 

assessment and dose assessment for EPA and the NRC, but 

we don't know, as a company, the DOE complex and the 

issues that you folks are dealing with. Joe brings to 

the table this know-how, which we consider to be very 

important. 

We've broken up -- what I have -- the way I've arranged the 

organization is a staff that crosses -- that will be 

supporting me. One I call quality assurance. A lot of 

folks are not familiar with the concept of quality 

assurance versus quality control. We all come out of 

the nuclear industry where that's our life's blood. If 

it is -- we have to follow very rigorous protocols to 

ensure quality. We have Dr. Steven* Ostrow, who is 

going to basically provide audits of our work to make 

sure that we do everything in accordance with the 

procedures that we have written up in our plan to you 

folks, and he will be auditing that to make sure we do 

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that. 

And to the right of me on this org. chart is our records 

management specialist. We'll be tal-- I'll be talking 

about these people a little bit more when we get into 

each individual, but we -- our vision of the project is 

that it's going to be ve-- it's critical that we 

maintain a complete record that will be accessible to 

the Board. All of the information we use should be 

completely transparent. And I realize there's going to 

be a lot of hard copy and electronic versions. Some 

documents might need to be controlled, so we have a 

records management specialist. I'll tell you a little 

bit more about Kathy Behling when we get into the 

individuals. 

Then we've broken up the project functionally according to 

the scope of work that we would be covering. We have a 

-- our -- a large staff to do the reviews of the 

individual dose reconstructions. We have a -- the 

center box there is to do worker and site profile 

reviews. And then we have a third box which is SEC 

petition reviews and supporting that aspect. So we've 

broken up ourselves functionally into those areas. 

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Reality is, on projects like this, it has to have a certain 

fluidity to it. All of the people that we were talking 

about are -- are available to work basically on 

whatever is needed. 

The bottom half -- bottom half box, what we did is we went 

out and tried to find the best people we could -- this 

is where this associate relationship becomes very 

valuable -- in all of the areas that we felt were 

important to have access, ready access to powerful 

expertise to be brought in as needed to -- to get the 

job done. So we have a total of about 31 people that's 

available to the project. 

And we -- one more point that I'd like to make is we also 

put in place a very powerful conflict of interest 

control process. We understand the importance of 

conflict of interest. And everyone that comes aboard 

and is part of our team has to go through a vetting 

process before they can be part of the team to make 

sure that we meet all conflict of interest issues. So 

no one comes aboard unless you say it's okay, and we 

have a process to do that. 

Let me just introduce -- what I've done in the org. chart is 

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I've identified what I call lead individuals. These 

are -- this is the heart of the operation. I'm going 

to just give you a brief biosketch on each person so 

you get to know who we are. 

I'm the project manager. I have a Ph.D. in health physics 

from New York University Medical Center. I studied 

under Dr. Merril Eisenbud, and many of you folks may 

remember Merril. I have also been certified as a 

health physicist since -- continually since 1976, and 

my whole life has been doing dose calculations. 

Kathleen Behling, she is our records management specialist. 

She has an associate's degree and 30 years experience 

in records management. She spent a large part of her 

career responsible for records management at GP Nuclear 

and maintaining all the occupational exposure records 

electronically and at -- in our -- at our company, and 

she's been with us now for about ten years, maybe 

longer. She does all our records management work 

related to our dose reconstruction work for CDC. 

As you can imagine, when you do an off-site dose 

reconstruction -- in fact I -- work we did a while back 

for CDC involved 65,000 boxes that we had to go through 

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and -- and create electronic files, vet them out and 

collect electronic files, and she was responsible --

together with our database management people -- to 

create this bibliographic database, so she's -- she's 

the records management specialist. 

Hans Behling. Hans Behling has a Ph.D. in health physics 

and a master's in public health, 35 years experience. 

He spent many years at the (inaudible) after TMI to get 

-- straighten out the situation. He is -- as far as 

I'm concerned, I've been working with him now for ten 

years -- one of the best health physicists I've ever 

met, and he's a pit bull. He will dig and he will dig, 

and he has a great deal of experience in dose 

reconstruction. 

Our company was hired by the Republic of the Marshall 

Islands on behalf of the claimants who were concerned 

that they were not getting treated right in their 

compensation for their claims, and we were asked to 

reconstruct the doses to the people of Marshall Islands 

from the Bravo test. The Bravo test is an infamous 

test that resulted in very large exposures to a large 

number of Marshall Islanders and we were asked to come 

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in an independently dig through ancient records to 

reconstruct the doses that were experienced by the 

people of Marshall Islands. We came and -- our 

findings were very interesting. We believe the 

government underestimated the thyroid doses by about a 

factor of ten, and the whole body doses by about a 

factor of two, and that's very controversial -- getting 

a lot of heat on that, but we've got the evidence. 

Victor Evdokimoff, Victor is a certified health physicist. 

His entire career was dedicated to hospital health 

physics. He was the -- he is recently retired as the 

RSO for Boston University Medical Center. And Victor 

is recently retired from that position and he's with 

SC&A now. 

Joyce Lipsztein, Joyce is a -- has a Ph.D. in health 

physics. She also went through the same program that I 

went through at New York University Medical Center 

under Dr. Eisenbud, and she's I guess perhaps one of 

the lead-- world's leading experts on internal 

dosimetry. She knows IMBA like her own name. She 

could -- she could talk the talk, so we are so pleased 

because she also recently retired as a professor and 

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has joined SC&A and she's available to us full time, so 

we have access to what I consider to be one of the 

world's experts on internal dosimetry and all of the 

software, including IMBA, that's used to reconstruct 

doses. 

Arjun Makhijani, you folks know Arjun. Arjun is an advocate 

for worker rights and we feel that -- and -- but also 

he is a superb scientist. And so he brings to the 

table what I believe is -- how do I best say this? 

When you're in -- when you work in the nuclear 

industry, you know, sometimes your bills are being paid 

by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Department 

of Energy, and what we have here is a mix of people 

that come from many diverse backgrounds. Arjun is a 

strong advocate for -- for worker rights. He will --

he will lead up the SEC petition reviews, and -- and 

he's available to us -- he's one of the individuals 

that's only available to us about half-time. Everyone 

else here is available to us just about full time. 

Steve Ostrow I mentioned earlier. He's in charge of quality 

assurance. He's going to be the watchdog to make sure 

we're following our procedures and fulfilling our 

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obligations under our standard operating procedures. 

Bill Ulicny, we drafted him from our field program. He's a 

great health physicist. He's one of the younger 

members of the team and he will be a case manager. 

Oh, one of the points I'd like to make regarding the way we 

think about this project is we are -- we believe in the 

concept of a case manager. That is, every case that we 

review, there will be a person who we -- who will be 

held accountable for making sure that case is processed 

properly. And so we have identified a number of people 

who will serve as case managers, and they have the 

freedom to draw upon all the resources of the -- of our 

project team and more, if necessary. We'll go outside 

and get whatever is necessary. So Bill will be one of 

our case managers. 

And finally is Joe Fitzgerald. He's the president of 

Salient, a recently-formed corporation. They're a 

subcontract to us, and as you know, Joe is a -- very 

knowledgeable on the DOE complex. 

Okay. With that, you have a pretty good idea of who SC&A is 

and the people that will be working on this project. I 

now will just briefly go over the scope of work that we 

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were asked to -- to write a proposal for. This came in 

back in November, and as I mentioned, on December 2nd 

we filed our proposal. 

Task one is -- is the big task. It involves us doing 

reviews of 70 basic dose reconstructions, 70 advanced 

dose reconstructions and ten blind dose 

reconstructions. And we haven't yet received any of 

the -- I guess you would call it the administrative 

records, so how we're actually going to staff to get 

that work done will depend very much on what -- what 

the issues are and we'll staff it accordingly. And we 

will certainly keep you apprised of how we're doing 

that once -- once we get the ball rolling. 

We've also been asked to support each of the Advisory Board 

meetings, so every one of these meetings, we'll --

we'll be here and we will be giving briefings on what 

we found out so far. 

We've also been asked to take a look at -- apparently there 

are procedures that have been prepared by -- by NIOSH 

to review the SEC petitions, and we've been asked to do 

a critical review of that. 

And then of course in number six there, these are -- there's 

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a lot of deliverables, there are lots of reports that 

we will be delivering. And all of this work -- this 

will be performed over a one-year period, once we get 

the green light to proceed. 

Task two focuses in on site profiles. Basically -- and this 

would be -- the site profile work on this project, as I 

mentioned, is -- is -- would be headed up by Joe 

Fitzgerald, and he will be drawing upon all the 

resources of -- of our organization. Not only the 

organization chart we showed here, but whatever it 

takes to get the job done. 

Basically the TORP, the task order request for proposal that 

we received from the Board and from NIOSH, identified a 

possibility that this coming year we may be asked to do 

a critical review of -- of 16, up to 16 site -- site 

profiles, and part of that work will include not only 

reviewing it for completeness, but also performing what 

we call worst-case analysis. That is, given the data, 

use that data to evaluate what we think the upper bound 

doses might have been associate with particular 

operations for each one of these. And that's where we 

bring in again our team of health physicists. So you 

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always think about you have the -- the radiological 

engineers and the health physicists looking at the site 

profiles, and then we have a team of specialists like 

Joyce who will help in evaluating what they call worstcase scenarios. A part of that work will include 

making visits to the sites and -- and digging and 

digging and digging to make sure that we turned over 

every stone to make sure the site profiles are as 

complete, that -- that -- as they can be. 

Task three, you're probably familiar with the OCAS -- I 

guess it's IG-1 and IG-2. These are the procedures 

that are currently being used by NIOSH and their 

contractor to perform external dose reconstruction and 

internal dose reconstruction. But in addition to that, 

there are also -- we became aware of a large number of 

additional procedures that have been prepared by NIOSH 

contractors, and these basically are the procedures 

that they're following -- they're technical procedures. 

So this task basically involves us performing a 

independent technical review of those procedures. 

We believe that the same people that are reviewing the dose 

reconstructions should also be the people reviewing the 

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procedures, so they will be responsible for doing --

the same people will be working on task three as are 

working on task one. 

Finally our fourth and last task is called the dose 

reconstruction review tracking. What -- what this is 

is that we're -- we're going to generate a great deal 

of information. I mean beside the records, electronic 

or hard copy, we receive regarding the cases or 

regarding the site profiles, we will be receiving -- we 

will be filling out -- the way we are approaching the 

project is a very, very formal documentation process of 

audits where each review follows an audit procedure, 

check list, sign-offs, and so we're going to be 

generating a lot of data and information. Our plan is 

to build a database management system that is 

compatible or integrated with your Sequel* 2000 that 

will allow the Board to -- to basically do sorts on --

on the records, that data that's in there, that will 

help serve your purposes in tracking performance, doing 

statistical workups of the data. So -- and so -- we 

have Don Loomis who specializes in database management 

system. I know -- Sequel is his -- he knows Sequel the 

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way Joyce knows IMBA, so we -- we feel very comfortable 

that we can design and build for you whatever you need. 

And it's easy to do. He says don't worry about this 

one. The others are going to be some tough ones. 

Don't worry about this. We'll -- we'll build whatever 

you want. 

And that -- that really concludes my overview. I'd like to 

just make one statement. I've been in -- I've been 

doing dose calculations for 30 years. This is the most 

important project I've ever been on and I'm very, very 

pleased that you selected us. Thank you. Any 

questions? 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you very much, John, for that overview of 

your company and capabilities. We'll now open the 

floor for questions from the Board. Again, I'll remind 

the Board members that you pretty much need to confine 

your questions to the material that John has presented 

here. That restricts your questioning right away, 

doesn't it? 

John, you indicated that in addition to the roughly 30 

folks, you have the capability of bringing others in on 

rather short notice. Is that correct? 

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DR. MAURO: Yeah, we've -- we've built up -- right now we 

have 50 active associates. We have 30 full-time 

employees and 50 active associates. However, we've --

we develop associate -- we actually at one time had 

perhaps 200 associates, so we have a relationship with 

a -- a network that -- that -- throughout the United 

States of -- for example, you'll notice Art Upton is on 

our org. chart. 

DR. ZIEMER: Uh-huh. 

DR. MAURO: Well -- or Doug Boreham -- I don't know if you 

know Doug, he was up at (inaudible) University. He 

specializes in biomarkers. These -- these are folks 

that are -- that I consider to be the best people there 

are out there to address particular questions. We have 

a list right now of hundreds of specialists in all the 

radiological sciences and the nuclear sciences that --

that we have an ongoing relationship with. I mean all 

of the -- the key people -- you'll notice by the list 

of names here, we -- we all have 30 years experience 

under our belt. Collectively we have a network of 

relationships, of people that we can draw upon. So 

when special problems arise -- in fact, for example, 

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before the Board -- I don't know this individual, but 

is a Dr. Hunt who's -- I believe Great Britain, that 

Joyce said listen, you -- we've got to get Dr. Hunt 

abo-- available because there's no one who understands 

film badge dosimetry and converting film badge readings 

to organ doses better than he does, so we brought him 

aboard. We envision that there are going to be 

problems that are going to come up that are going to be 

very specialized. And so what I'm saying is that what 

we're in a position to do is very quickly bring aboard 

associates within a day -- for some reason, if we have 

a need -- so we -- there's no boundaries. We can 

either do that, or we can bring aboard a subcontractor. 

That's more of a difficult thing to do. There are 

companies that have certain specialty expertise that 

you may want to bring in. We're very much open to 

doing that. But usually that takes a little longer 

because we have to put the contract in place, and the 

vetting process regarding conflict of interest becomes 

a little more burdensome. But -- but yes... 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, thank you very -- oh, here's a question. 

Roy DeHart. 

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DR. DEHART: I actually was going to ask the question, but 

you answered it as you were talking through, and that 

is most of our -- essentially all of our cases that 

we're going to be reviewing have medical problems. 

They have cancer. And I noticed that there was the 

absence of any physician being listed, but when you 

mentioned Art -- you took care of that issue. 

DR. MAURO: Okay, right. Yeah, Art and I are -- are 

friends. He -- he was part of the NYU -- New York 

University Medical Center program and over the years I 

-- we've been working with him. He's been an SC&A 

associate for many years. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, thank you very much. We appreciate your 

being here today. 

REVIEW AND APPROVAL OF DRAFT MINUTES, MEETING 18
 

We now have opportunity for a working session. We have 

several items that we need to address. First of all, 

beginning with the minutes to the 18th meeting -- let 

me get my copy back from Ray here. I'd like to ask 

Board members for any additions or corrections to the 

minutes. 

Let me begin by indicating that in the executive summary I 

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have asked Ray to insert on -- looking for a page 

number here. It's the first page of the executive 

summary. It would be the third section under OCAS 

Program Status Report, David Sundin's report where he 

announces the number of claims to date. I asked Ray to 

insert the number of claims in the summary here so that 

it is more specific in the executive summary. 

Likewise at the top of the next page where it indicates four 

completed site profiles, to identify those four sites 

in the executive summary. 

Now other -- other comments? And again we're asking for 

substantive ones as opposed to simply grammatical. Did 

you all check those items that are attributed to you to 

make sure -- Wanda, you have one that you wanted to 

raise, I believe. 

MS. MUNN: I have two. On page 20 where Ms. Munn begins 

talking. We've just finished talking about the 

procedure for individual dose reconstruction, and it's 

not clear to me in that sentence exactly what I was 

talking about. 

DR. ZIEMER: Let's make sure at page 20 -- page 20, I'm 

looking to make sure because I have a downloaded 

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version which seems to have ended up with different 

page numbers and so on, but --

MS. MUNN: All right, the --

DR. ZIEMER: -- this is the copy that was in our packet, I 

guess. 

MS. MUNN: Yes, in the center of the page, the motion to 

approve the procedure for processing passed 

unanimously. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

MS. MUNN: And then the next sentence, Ms. Munn indicated 

she was still concerned about the large number of site 

profiles being required. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, so to -- for clarity, to add the words 

"of site profiles" --

MS. MUNN: "Of site profiles being required." Because our 

discussion was about how quickly these were going to be 

done. 

DR. ZIEMER: Right. And so without objection, we'll add 

that. 

MS. MUNN: And the other concern, page 32, second paragraph. 

Jim Neton was talking here and the first sentence of 

the second paragraph says "Determination of external 

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doses was covered by general considerations, 

unmonitored workers." I'm not certain exactly what 

that means. I think I'd have to go back to the 

transcript to get the full sense of that, but that 

sentence appears to need some grammatical correction of 

some sort. I'm not sure exactly what. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yes, it's -- does not appear to be clear to --

does anyone know what -- Jim, she's attributing this to 

you. 

DR. MELIUS: No, Jim Neton. 

DR. ZIEMER: Oh, to Jim Neton. Oh, oh, the other Jim. 

Okay. Okay, so we will ask for that sentence to be 

clarified. 

Does that cover the ones -- okay. So we don't know how that 

will be fixed right now, but we will fix it. 

DR. MELIUS: Just put a mumble in there. Dr. Melius 

mumbled; couldn't understand a word he was saying. 

DR. ZIEMER: I found the Gen Roessler statement that I was 

trying to understand. 

DR. ROESSLER: Okay. 

DR. ZIEMER: It's on page 32. It's bullet five. Dr. 

Roessler asked what part of the total was assumed for 

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the chest X-ray. What part of the total. 

DR. ROESSLER: I think on that Jim was talking about typical 

doses to workers, and he had a chart up and he showed 

chest X-ray and I -- I kind of thought that was a maybe 

a major part of the dose and so I asked him 

specifically what -- what dose was due to the chest Xray, and he didn't specifically have an answer. He 

just said it would be typical for whatever was used in 

medical facilities at the time. Does that help? 

DR. ZIEMER: What part of what total? A typical total 

worker dose? Is that --

DR. ROESSLER: I think that's what he was talking about, as 

best I can remember. We might have to go back to the 

slides he was using, but I seem to recall he had one 

slide where he showed a typical dose and he included a 

chest X-ray. 

DR. ZIEMER: So it would be something like what part of the 

total in the example? Well, perhaps we can ask that --

that that --

DR. ROESSLER: I think we need to the record. 

DR. ZIEMER: It's not clear to me exactly what they're 

talking about. 

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Other -- other items that anyone wishes to call attention 

to? Did you have another one, Wanda, or is --

MS. MUNN: No. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. No others? Let me ask for -- if the 

group is willing for us to make appropriate fixes to 

those two spots, if you then are willing to approve the 

minutes, including the executive summary, as slightly 

modified. Is there a motion to that effect? 

MS. MUNN: So moved. 

MR. PRESLEY: Second. 

DR. ZIEMER: It's been moved and seconded. All in favor of 

approving the minutes, subject to relatively minor 

fixes, please say aye. 

 (Affirmative responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: Any opposed? 

 (No responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: Motion carries. 

(Pause) 

DR. ZIEMER: Larry wants to ask a question relative to 

minutes. 

MR. ELLIOTT: These minutes are very detailed in their 

content, and I would just ask for the Board's sense on 

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what you would be happy with. Is this what you're 

happy with as far as your minutes, or would you --

DR. ZIEMER: As far as level of detail, I think you're 

asking. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Right. Or would you prefer perhaps to see 

something like the executive summary, six pages or 

less, and then use the transcript to rely on that, on 

what the verbatim is to what was actually discussed and 

held. How would you --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, just give us some feedback on this. 

We've been trying to condense them and they're --

MR. ELLIOTT: Cori, am I correct that -- that this executive 

summary and then the full text of minutes that we are 

using is not -- it's something we can change. We can -

- the Board wants to have just an executive summary 

style set of minutes, they can do that. 

MS. HOMER: (Off microphone) We have some (Inaudible) can be 

met in a much shorter version. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: Jim. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I actually like this particular style, so 

I speak in favor of keeping it. I think --

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DR. ZIEMER: About this level of detail? 

DR. MELIUS: About this level of detail, 'cause I think it 

is helpful to be able to not have to refer back to the 

transcripts to find what someone said at this point in 

time. 

DR. ZIEMER: Gen Roessler? 

DR. ROESSLER: I think we owe this amount of detail to the 

people who are looking at our minutes, and I know there 

are people -- particularly in health physics -- who are 

reviewing what we're doing, and I think we need at 

least this much detail. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Mark, did you also have a comment? 

MR. GRIFFON: Just the -- the same comment as Jim, that not 

-- not too many people are going to turn to the 

transcripts, so I think this level of detail is good. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Other -- any others want to weigh in one 

way or the other? Do you want them shorter, longer, 

this feel --

MR. PRESLEY: I agree. 

DR. ZIEMER: Seems to be a sort of a general consensus that 

maybe we're at about the right level. Okay. Thank 

you, that's very helpful. 

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Okay, Ray, I think --

THE COURT REPORTER: Who made the second to approve them? I 

didn't hear --

MS. MUNN: Presley. 

DR. ZIEMER: I'm sorry? 

THE COURT REPORTER: Who made the second to approve these 

minutes? I didn't see it. 

DR. ZIEMER: Who made the second to approve the minutes? 

Okay. Robert, thank you. 

(Pause) 

BOARD DISCUSSION/WORKING SESSION
 

DR. ZIEMER: One of the issues that arose at our last 

meeting -- and I'll simply remind the Board of it and 

then we can handle it as you see fit -- was whether or 

not we should have a -- a subcom-- put in place a 

subcommittee, as opposed to a working group, a 

chartered subcommittee to handle the ongoing issues 

relating to dose reconstruction and our interactions 

with the contractor. It may be that the Board will 

wish to delay that decision on establishing a working -

- or a subcommittee until after we have a chance to 

review the contractor's proposal later today. But 

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nonetheless, let me ask if the Board does at this time 

wish to move forward on that issue or -- in the absence 

of that, we remain operating as a committee of the 

whole on the issue of how we direct and work with our 

contractor. I'll open that for any comments or 

specific recommendations. Begin with Dr. Melius. 

DR. MELIUS: I agree, it's difficult to talk about this with 

specificity now until we've gone into closed session. 

However, I think -- I am a little uncomfortable about 

us making major changes in Board procedure or sort of 

the issue of the public's access to what we're -- to 

our activities and so forth -- to do that in closed 

session. So I think it would be worthwhile having some 

discussion of the concept and -- of subcommittee and at 

least some sense of where we --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

DR. MELIUS: -- where we should go with it and what the sub-

- a subcommittee or working group might -- might do or 

not, but recognizing that we may have to sort of 

develop the specific charge for the subcommittee in 

closed session, given the situation, that all we can do 

right now is --

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DR. ZIEMER: No, actually this could not be part of our 

closed session today. 

DR. MELIUS: Okay, that was actually --

DR. ZIEMER: I'm sorry if I suggested that. I suggested 

that the decision on doing that may need to wait till 

the results of the closed session are known to us. But 

we -- we would not -- we cannot carry out other 

business in the closed session other than reviewing and 

addressing the cost proposal that is before us. This, 

of necessity, must be an open session item. So -- and 

all I'm saying is that unless we choose to do something 

this morning on that, we would defer and would continue 

to act as a committee of the whole until our next 

meeting, at which point we could decide to establish a 

subcommittee on an ongoing basis. There's not a 

necessity that we have a subcommittee at the moment. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, can I just say two things to address 

that? And some of this is going to be a question for 

Larry. One is that I think first of all we ought to 

look and -- and see what -- what we might lose or gain, 

depending on what happens this afternoon, in terms of 

timing of task orders and so forth if we -- I think our 

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next meeting's what, about two months away -- until 

then 'cause -- I mean I think if -- to the extent we 

could facilitate this moving forward through a 

subcommittee, I think it would be -- be good. It may 

be that we would then -- so that's one question. The 

second question is I think it would be worthwhile 

having a larger discussion of what a subcommittee might 

do on an ongoing basis. We may have to defer the 

decision on that to the -- to the next meeting. But I 

wouldn't see -- there certainly might be some value to 

having a subcommittee that would last until the next 

meeting and would have a very specific charge to it in 

terms of what it -- it might do, though I'm not sure 

what that charge would be until I understand the 

process, and even then I'm not sure we can do anything 

in this session on a contingent basis --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, a subcommittee that lasts until our next 

meeting looks much more like a workgroup as it's ad hoc 

and very specific. But unless -- right now we would be 

operating in the absence of having a precise knowledge 

of what the charge would be to such a workgroup. 

DR. MELIUS: Well, I think we could -- well, I'm not sure 

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'cause I'm not sure what the procedure is. I would 

think that, though -- that a -- as I understand it, a 

subcommittee can take actions on behalf of the Board 

between meetings; a workgroup cannot. 

DR. ZIEMER: If the Board so authorizes. 

DR. MELIUS: Correct. Correct. And so I guess my question 

is, number one, in the short term -- and this question 

I think is to Larry -- given the process, given what 

might occur this afternoon -- you know, what are the --

what are the possibilities this afternoon, and then do 

any of those possibilities... 

MR. ELLIOTT: I think --

DR. MELIUS: -- would be assisted by having action by the 

next meeting. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I think it would be beneficial for the Board 

to hear again the process from -- from this point 

forward, and that'll give you a better sense of, you 

know, what kind of a delay might occur and how you 

might react to -- to that. So I'd ask Martha if she 

would again cover the ground of how -- how this thing 

is going to -- going to work. 

MS. DIMUZIO: Well, basically, you know, we'll go into 

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closed session this afternoon to review the proposals 

and -- and the cost estimates that have been provided 

by Sanford Cohen. The Board at that point can either 

determine to accept the proposals as -- as -- as 

they've been submitted, and then we would move forward 

with award. If there are questions related to the --

the approach or level of effort that may -- the 

contractor may be proposing and things like that and 

there are specific questions, we would generate those 

questions, those questions would be forwarded to our 

procurement office, who would then provide them to 

Sanford Cohen for response. At that point Sanford 

Cohen has seven days to respond to those questions and 

potentially re-propose against those four tasks, and 

that point in time we would have those proposals to 

forward out back to the Board for them to approve. 

MR. ELLIOTT: And you can put forth an extension of time if 

-- if appropriate and necessary and justified. 

MS. DIMUZIO: Right, yes, if Sanford Cohen needed additional 

time to prepare their responses or whatever, then yes, 

I mean we can give them additional time of seven days 

to respond, yes. 

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DR. ZIEMER: Okay, let's go ahead and get some other 

comments here and then we'll proceed. Let's see, Henry 

and then Wanda. 

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah, my -- I guess my thoughts are if the 

intent is to have a subgroup so that we can move 

expeditiously, I think we could also continue with a --

I mean for a subgroup you still have to -- or 

subcommittee, you still have to post it in the Federal 

Re-- or you know, you've got to have all the advance 

notice and all that kind of thing. It would seem to me 

we could simply do that as a committee of the whole, 

recognize that the only thing we have to have is a 

quorum and, you know, if we have to have multiple 

calls, you know, getting a subcommittee together can 

probably be more problematic than just getting a quorum 

from the -- from the Board to address whatever needs to 

be talked about, but as far as the logistics of doing 

the announcement, it's not much different, so that 

might be the way -- and then as activities go, we could 

see whether there's some more routine activities that a 

subcommittee would be more advantageous, but I -- I 

just think we're early on enough that everybody's going 

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to want to see it and probably be involved in the 

decision process. And we just have to recognize on 

short notice some people won't make it and we'll just 

have to be sure that, whatever the call is, we've got 

the quorum. 

DR. ZIEMER: Wanda. 

DR. ANDERSON: You can't do it by --

MR. ELLIOTT: By call. 

DR. ANDERSON: You can't do it by call? 

MR. ELLIOTT: No. You cannot hold a closed session --

DR. ANDERSON: No, no --

MR. ELLIOTT: -- by phone call. 

DR. ANDERSON: Okay, this would have to be a closed session. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yes. 

DR. ANDERSON: Oh, okay, I was thinking --

MR. ELLIOTT: This is a negotiation --

DR. ANDERSON: -- a subcommittee action would be --

MR. ELLIOTT: This is a negotiation between --

DR. ANDERSON: Oh, this is for --

MR. ELLIOTT: -- you as the government and your contractor. 

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah, okay, I see. I thought there would be 

other issues to look at. Sorry, never mind. 

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MR. ELLIOTT: Sorry. 

DR. ZIEMER: It would be equivalent to doing what we're 

doing this afternoon with a -- some sort of perhaps a -

- assuming we needed revisions. 

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: Maybe we don't. 

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: But if we did... Wanda. 

MS. MUNN: Although it appears cumbersome to act as a 

committee of the whole, in the absence of a triggering 

event or substances that would -- circumstances that 

would clearly require the more concentrated efforts of 

a subcommittee, I see no reason for us to further 

discuss establishing one at this time. 

DR. ZIEMER: Jim, did you have an additional comment? 

DR. MELIUS: I have an additional comment. If I followed 

you, Martha, correctly -- and I'm guessing at times and 

given holiday seasons, but my sense is that the 

earliest go back and forth with Sanford Cohen & 

Associates would -- end with us getting a new proposal 

around the first of the year. 

MS. DIMUZIO: That's correct. 

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DR. MELIUS: Yeah, so it would be about right. Our 

meeting's the first week in February, so we would be 

losing a month of work in terms of -- of tasks, should 

they have to be revised, et cetera. 

I guess another question is -- and I don't know that the 

answer is -- can the process go on more than once? Can 

we end up going back and forth with them... 

MS. DIMUZIO: Yes, technically you could. I mean if -- if 

level of effort was still not correct, if, you know, 

they still didn't fully understand the -- you know, how 

we wanted them to revise if necessary, then yes, you --

you could be going back with -- with a follow-up, yes. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Martha, can there be back-and-forth in written 

form between the contractor and the full Board? 

MS. DIMUZIO: I believe so. I'd want to --

MR. ELLIOTT: So for example, on a specific --

MS. DIMUZIO: -- verify that with --

MR. ELLIOTT: -- task, if -- if there were --

MS. DIMUZIO: -- Larry, but --

MR. ELLIOTT: -- limited questions or issues regarding a 

proposal on a given task, and the Board puts that 

together and goes back to the contractor and then they 

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get a revised proposal and it looks okay, the Board 

could take action on that and make an award by letter 

to procurement. 

MS. DIMUZIO: Yes, you could do that. You would just have 

to have some mechanism for all of the Board to approve 

the questions --

MR. ELLIOTT: Approve and agree. 

MS. DIMUZIO: -- and review the questions and okay the 

questions in some type of session that would not be 

open to the public. But yeah, I mean -- and I don't 

know how you would --

MR. ELLIOTT: Cori, is there a way to do that by -- by mail? 

MS. HOMER: (Off microphone) I'm sorry, I was -- the music 

is a little loud back here. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Okay. I'm trying to get at can the Board 

conduct some of this business of awarding a task 

without having a face-to-face meeting and going back 

and forth between them and their contractor by -- by 

mail, perhaps, and get a sense that -- that the full 

Board is in agreement, has a -- has a -- no? 

MS. HOMER: I don't believe so. I -- I could check into 

that, but the -- any action taken by the Board is 

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considered a meeting, period -- has to be announced. 

If it's closed, it has to be announced as closed and 

approval has to be gained for that. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. Actually that sounds true. I mean it 

sounds -- it sounds like if you tried to do things by 

letter, you're circumventing the intent of the -- the 

process so that --

MS. HOMER: (Off microphone) Yeah, the same -- the same 

(Inaudible) for a subcommittee, as well. 

DR. ZIEMER: I might add -- and let me ask this -- or 

perhaps make it a comment and ask a question. If --

we're presuming that there might be changes, but maybe 

there won't. But let's assume that out of today's 

session the Board raises some comments and asks for 

feedback. 

MS. HOMER: Uh-huh. 

DR. ZIEMER: And the result is some sort of a revised 

proposal around the first of the year, as was 

suggested. If at that point the Board felt that there 

was some urgency in acting on that new proposal, would 

it not be possible to announce in the Federal Register
 

that in two weeks or something we're going to meet --

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MS. HOMER: Uh-huh. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- I don't know, Cincinnati or somewhere for 

the express purpose, in closed session, of making the 

final -- taking the final action on that? 

MS. HOMER: That's possible. 

DR. ZIEMER: I know it's not optimal. 

MS. HOMER: No, it's not. We have to have seven days. 

DR. ZIEMER: But if there's some reason to shorten --

otherwise we have the month, quote, loss, but if the 

Board felt that we can't afford to sit here for a month 

with nothing happening --

MS. HOMER: Uh-huh. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- we need to go forward, we could meet. 

MS. HOMER: It would be tough. 

DR. ZIEMER: I mean whether it was the Board or the 

subcommittee, you have to do the same thing. 

MS. HOMER: Yeah, I mean --

DR. ZIEMER: You have to make the announcement --

MS. HOMER: -- given the appropriate resources, we could --

we could pull that off. I mean the -- the --

DR. ZIEMER: And could we not --

MS. HOMER: -- Federal Register notice --

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DR. ZIEMER: -- even reserve some time in advance for that 

possibility? 

MS. HOMER: I would suggest we do that, yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: And then if we didn't need to use -- use the --

it could -- is it easier to cancel an --

MS. HOMER: It's very difficult to cancel --

DR. ZIEMER: -- announced meeting than it is to add one? 

MS. HOMER: -- hotel arrangements. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I think --

MS. HOMER: If I have a contract with a hotel, it's very 

difficult to can-- I'm sorry. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I think for the benefit of this discussion, 

though, we -- you could have your closed session and --

in the offices --

MS. HOMER: Yes, we could. 

MR. ELLIOTT: -- at NIOSH in Cincinnati. And let's be 

minimal in what the expectations are to set up that 

meeting. 

MS. HOMER: Yes. 

MR. ELLIOTT: That would be a seven-day advance notice for 

the Federal Register that we'd have to put in. 

MS. HOMER: We have to have seven days to get it published. 

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It can be published on an emergency basis. 

Determination to close can probably be rushed. As long 

as we are not dealing with a contract with a hotel, I 

don't foresee a problem with that. I mean rooms are --

I'm sure we can find lodging for you at a hotel which -

- which would not --

DR. ZIEMER: Larry volunteered --

MS. HOMER: -- mean a contract. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- four bedrooms. 

DR. MELIUS: I can't wait. 

DR. ZIEMER: I don't want to be in --

MR. ELLIOTT: I have a tent, too. 

DR. ZIEMER: Jim. 

DR. MELIUS: To me, rather than doing something contingent 

on a full Board, I think let's explore the subcommittee 

issue. We've got some time this morning and seems to 

me that if a subcommittee could be charged -- well, I 

guess this is the question again. Can the subcommittee 

be charged with, you know, reviewing a response from 

the contractor should be -- should it be necessary, 

based on our meeting this afternoon, and then approving 

it? And -- and the instructions for that approval, the 

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circum-- you know, whatever you want to call --

MR. ELLIOTT: With the bounds on it. 

DR. MELIUS: -- with the bounds on it could be, to some 

extent, set this afternoon by -- by what our 

instructions are back to the -- I mean I think in 

essence we end up doing that when we -- the questions 

and -- should we send those back to the contractor. I 

mean to me it would be a lot more --

DR. ZIEMER: What you're proposing if you're bounding it, 

for example, in terms of dollar values, I don't think 

we can do that in -- at this point. 

MR. ELLIOTT: You couldn't do that in this meeting. 

DR. ZIEMER: In this meeting. 

MR. ELLIOTT: You couldn't do that in this public meeting. 

You could -- you could do that in -- if you set up a 

subcommittee or if you set up, as part of your 

discussion in the closed session this afternoon, what 

your expectations are and the next meeting is either a 

subcommittee or a quorum of this body, that's your 

guidance. 

MS. HOMER: I would like to --

DR. MELIUS: And that's going to --

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MS. HOMER: I'm sorry, Dr. Melius, but I would like to point 

out that you can make the decision to establish a 

subcommittee, but administratively it still has to be 

established prior to any meeting taking place. 

Whatever --

DR. ZIEMER: Has to go through the --

MS. HOMER: -- decision that you make --

DR. ZIEMER: -- CDC process. 

MS. HOMER: Correct, uh-huh. 

MR. ELLIOTT: It has to have a charter. 

MS. HOMER: Yes. 

MR. ELLIOTT: The charter has to be signed off on. 

MS. HOMER: Well, it's an establishment memo that will 

provide membership, it will provide the function, it 

will provide frequency of meetings --

MR. ELLIOTT: Delegation of authority from the Board. 

MS. HOMER: Well, and that's something -- yeah, we would 

probably have to discuss that. 

DR. MELIUS: How long? 

MS. HOMER: I suspect it could take two weeks. With the 

holidays, maybe a little longer. 

DR. MELIUS: Christmas Eve we'll... 

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DR. ZIEMER: Comment over here. 

DR. DEHART: If I understand, we would need only a quorum of 

this committee, which is 50 percent plus one, and the 

odds of being able to find that number to attend a 

meeting is probably greater than having a subcommittee 

with limited numbers to be able to meet, so I see no 

advantage at all at this point to try to create and 

generate a subcommittee and just have the -- just have 

us as a whole try to address the issue. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Other comments? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I guess I was just thinking the opposite, 

that -- that we could establish a subcommittee of say 

four people and those four people could pick a date a 

lot easier than whatever the quorum is -- what, six or 

seven -- I don't even remember what a quorum is, seven 

DR. ZIEMER: One more than half. 

DR. MELIUS: -- seven, so seven -- four people are easier to 

meet than seven. The question is, can we come -- I 

think the real question would be more do we want to 

spend the time and can we come to agreement at this 

meeting on a subcommittee charter, or is that going to 

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be something that's going to take us more than one 

meeting to work out. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, it's not obvious that four is easier than 

seven because it's a specific four versus any seven out 

of 12, so I'm not sure -- it's not obvious to me that -

- if it's a specific four, it may be actually harder to 

find a date, but that's what you're suggesting. And 

who knows, it depends on who the four are and who --

what the dates are, so who knows. 

Other comments? Henry. 

DR. ANDERSON: I guess the other thing to talk about, what 

would be the activities going forward of such a -- I 

think it's advantageous to have a relatively small 

group which would basically act as our project officer 

for the Board, as a collective group dealing, so kind 

of moving forward it would seem to me if there were 

questions that had to be dealt with --

DR. ZIEMER: Well, the original idea on this was more of a 

management type --

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- of group that would --

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah. 

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DR. ZIEMER: -- work with the contractor closely, help 

decide who --

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- which of the Board members would participate 

in different cases --

DR. ANDERSON: Yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- and so on, as opposed to a specific decision 

such as this one --

DR. ANDERSON: Right. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- which is on the contract itself. Okay. 

Other -- a comment, Cori? 

MS. HOMER: Yes, also something to consider would be that 

even if a subcommittee has been formed and the 

establishment has taken place, the Board still has to 

meet to determine what authority they're going to give 

to the subcommittee. That's still going to take a full 

meeting of the Board, at least one. 

DR. MELIUS: Again, just a question. Wouldn't you do that -

- couldn't -- if we did that today, doesn't that 

establish the charter and the -- the --

MS. HOMER: It does establish the charter, but it does not 

establish the authority that the Board is going to give 

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the subcommittee. Because the way that it works, 

without any authority, the subcommittee cannot take 

action without approval of the full Board. 

DR. MELIUS: But --

MS. HOMER: If the Board decides to give the subcommittee 

authority to act on their behalf, that authority has to 

be developed and approved before it can -- you know, 

before the subcommittee can take any action. 

DR. ZIEMER: Can that authority be given prior to the 

approval of a charter, which is what --

MS. HOMER: I would suggest not. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- which is the situation that we would have 

today. 

MS. HOMER: You could develop them at the same time. 

DR. ZIEMER: But until the charter was approved, the 

authority could not --

MS. HOMER: The authority has no -- no -- you have no 

authority. 

DR. ZIEMER: This is a little knotty, but I think in the 

interest of moving forward -- and we can return to this 

-- I think I'm simply going to rule that we will 

continue to operate as a committee of the whole for now 

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and -- particularly on this issue, and if necessary, 

try to establish some kind of a -- what I might call an 

emergency meeting of the Board if we need to do 

something before our next meeting. In the meantime, a 

-- more details on the charter can be developed. And 

actually there is some work that's been going on. Mark 

and I have worked together on some draft things for a 

possible charter and -- and may be that we'll have a 

chance to present that a little later even today, Mark, 

for this subcommittee. 

We do need to take a break and then return, so let's take a 

break till 10:15. 

(Whereupon, a recess was taken.) 

ADMINISTRATIVE HOUSEKEEPING AND BOARD WORK SCHEDULE
 

DR. ZIEMER: This is the time on our schedule that we take 

care of some administrative/housekeeping issues. We'll 

first turn the mike over to Cori to see if she has any 

particular items that she needs to bring to us. 

MS. HOMER: (Off microphone) Just a few things. Am I on? 

Okay. A couple of things just real quickly. Please don't 

forget to e-mail Larry your work time for the Board, 

prep time, any working groups that you -- that you were 

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on or worked for, and your Board time separately. Go 

ahead and send that to Larry as soon as you can, and cc 

me. 

I wanted to mention, I have some trouble getting all of the 

e-mails quickly. That delays payment for everybody, so 

please respond as quickly as you can with your time to 

Larry so that I can get you guys paid quickly. 

The closed session will be held in the Mesquite I Room, just 

past the front desk, down that long hallway. It's the 

first room on your left-hand side. It's taking place 

as scheduled on the agenda. 

DR. ZIEMER: At 2:00 o'clock at Mesquite --

MS. HOMER: At 2:00 o'clock at Mesquite I. Now for those 

that are going on the tour, we have a very, very full 

agenda for that day. Please dress casually. There 

will be no cameras, phones, blackberries, palm pilots, 

no forms of communication allowed, period. 

MR. PRESLEY: Picture I.D. 

MS. HOMER: Uh-huh. Bring water, because there will be ice 

chests, if you'd care to. And we'll be departing 

around 6:15, 6:30. I have an agenda and I will make 

you copies, but I haven't had the opportunity to do 

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that just yet. 

DR. ZIEMER: So you want people in the lobby at 6:15. Is 

that what you're saying or --

MS. HOMER: Yes. My apologies, but that's the agenda. They 

arrive at about 6:15 with the bus. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. And it's a drive out to the test site, 

an hour and a half, roughly. 

MS. HOMER: Well, they're saying about an hour, hour and 15 

minutes. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. 

MS. HOMER: Please be ready to pay --

DR. ZIEMER: So what -- what's the time to meet in the 

lobby, very speci--

MS. HOMER: Around 6:15, 6:30 --

DR. ZIEMER: Around? Exactly --

MR. ELLIOTT: Give it --

MS. HOMER: 6:20. 

DR. ZIEMER: 6:20. 

MS. HOMER: How's that? That'll give the bus five minutes. 

MR. ELLIOTT: How about if you say this. The bus leaves at 

6:30. 

MS. HOMER: There you go, the bus leaves at 6:30. 

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MR. ELLIOTT: Be there or --

MS. HOMER: Or miss the bus. 

MR. ELLIOTT: -- miss the bus. 

MS. HOMER: Since we've ordered lunches, for those that have 

ordered lunches, please be prepared to pay -- I believe 

it's $6.95 -- to their guide. I'm not going to be 

collecting any cash, so --

MR. PRESLEY: And they do take -- that's all they do take is 

cash. 

MS. HOMER: Is cash, so -- any questions? 

DR. ZIEMER: It can be in quarters, if necessary. 

MS. HOMER: Yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: Nickels, for the big spenders. 

MS. HOMER: Period, they will confiscate them. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Not on the bus. 

DR. ZIEMER: What --

MS. HOMER: That tell -- he was -- David was asking if we 

could even bring anything on the bus, and we cannot. 

Leave everything in your room. 

DR. ZIEMER: And by everything, you're talking about --

MS. HOMER: I'm talking about the electronics. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- any cameras, any --

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MS. HOMER: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- electronic things. 

MS. HOMER: Uh-huh. 

DR. ZIEMER: Don't even bring them there. 

MS. HOMER: That's right. They'll be confiscated. 

DR. ZIEMER: Permanently. 

MS. HOMER: No, they'll be given them back at the end of the 

tour when we arrive back at the hotel. That's --

that's what I've been instructed. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. 

MS. HOMER: Will that be it? 

DR. ZIEMER: Any questions for Cori? 

MR. ELLIOTT: When you turn your time in to me, keep in mind 

that the working group on the Board audit or the --

Mark Griffon's working group has now completed its 

charge and as of yesterday I believe the working group 

on -- Dr. Melius's working group on evaluating the 

interview process had completed its charge, so working 

groups have a finite life and they have -- once they 

meet their charge, then we can't bill time against 

them. 

DR. ZIEMER: But the time that they spent up till now --

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MR. ELLIOTT: Yes, yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- but don't come in two months or three months 

from now --

MR. ELLIOTT: Well, the point here is the working group on -

- Mark Griffon's working group on DR evaluation 

essentially completed its charge last meeting, so 

between last meeting and this meeting there shouldn't 

have been any -- any effort for that. 

MS. HOMER: Okay. Now did you want to discuss dates for a 

potential --

DR. ZIEMER: Yes, that's in fact the next item. 

MS. HOMER: Okay. 

DR. ZIEMER: Let me remind you that we have -- we are slated 

for the 5th and 6th of February, the meeting site being 

Augusta. And we may want to identify a contingency 

site in early to mid-January. This is -- we do require 

I think the presence of the Federal official, so we 

need as a front end -- I know that Larry's schedule I 

understand is pretty busy in January and so Larry, are 

there -- I think we start with you and I guess we also 

are required to have a Chair. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I think so. 

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DR. ZIEMER: But my guess is that your schedule in January 

is probably tighter than mine. I have decided not to 

attend the Citrus Bowl game on January 1st where Purdue 

will play Georgia, and my only conflict right now is 

the 30th of January, so I'm okay. Where are you, 

Larry, on --

MR. ELLIOTT: January 12th, 13th and 14th I plan to be in 

Richland with the site profile team disseminating that 

bit of information out there in -- for the Hanford 

folks, so I'll be on travel then. 

DR. ANDERSON: (Off microphone) Are you going to be there 

for the health effects subcommittee meeting, too? 

MR. ELLIOTT: I hadn't planned on that, don't know anything 

about that, so... 

DR. ANDERSON: 'Cause that's the 22nd and 23rd, I think. 

No, no, it's the 15th and 16th. 

MR. ELLIOTT: No, I had -- I had not planned to participate 

in the health effects subcommittee. 

Then on the -- January 2nd of course wold be not a good day. 

MS. HOMER: No. 

MR. ELLIOTT: That's coming back from the holiday. And the 

19th would not be a good day, either. That's a --

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that's a holiday I'd kind of like to take this time. 

And then the -- looks like the 26th and 27th would not 

be good days. 

DR. ZIEMER: Let's start with the week of the 5th then --

MS. HOMER: Dr. Ziemer, I have leave that week. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, that takes care of that week. Let's look 

at the week of the 12th. So you're out the 12th, 13th, 

14th --

MR. ELLIOTT: And 14th. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- and is the 15th a travel day also, then? 

MR. ELLIOTT: No, I'll be coming back on the 14th. 

DR. ZIEMER: We actually -- if we need a, quote, emergency 

meeting, we're talking about a one-day maximum, I 

think, so let -- let me ask about the 15th and 16th, 

are either of those days bad for anyone? 

DR. MELIUS: 16th is a -- may be problematic for me. The 

15th works, though. 

MR. GRIFFON: 15th is okay. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, 15th is a possibility? Let's look at the 

next week, 19th? 

MS. HOMER: No, somebody couldn't. 

DR. ZIEMER: 19th is a holiday. 

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DR. MELIUS: Yeah, the week of the 19th I'm tied up all 

week. 

DR. ZIEMER: Tied up all week. Others? And remember, we 

actually only need a quorum, but if possible, we'd like 

to get everybody there -- 20th through the 23rd are 

days then when we -- is there any -- are there more 

than one person not available on those days, and just 

make a note --

MR. PRESLEY: I can't be there the 22nd or the 23rd, but I 

can be there the 20th and the 21st. 

MR. ESPINOSA: I'm out the 23rd. 

DR. ZIEMER: Once we're beyond that, we're almost up to our 

other meeting, so there's no point in going further. 

DR. ANDERSON: After the 19th, we might as well put it off. 

DR. ZIEMER: Right. As -- there are possibilities, if 

necessary, 20 and 21, but it looks like perhaps the 

15th might be the day then. Should we go ahead and 

block that out? Is that too soon after you get back? 

MR. ELLIOTT: Huh-uh, that's --

DR. ZIEMER: You're all right? Is that agreeable? That's 

kind of half-way between --

MS. HOMER: The 15th is fine for me. 

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DR. ZIEMER: It's fine for counsel or -- okay. 

MS. MUNN: It's fine for me. I can fly back with Larry on 

the 14th. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, then let's set aside Thursday the 15th as 

a special meeting, if needed. 

MR. PRESLEY: Cincinnati? 

DR. MELIUS: Are we talking Cincinnati? 

MS. HOMER: I think that would be best. 

DR. ZIEMER: Cincinnati's all right? 

DR. MELIUS: Can we do it like 11:00 to 2:00 or something so 

people can fly in --

DR. ZIEMER: Fly in and fly out? Sure. 

DR. MELIUS: -- day trip, I think it would also allow I 

think the --

MS. HOMER: Will that be enough time? 

DR. MELIUS: -- west coast people to get back out. 

DR. ZIEMER: 11:00 to 2:00 or 11:00 to 3:00? 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yeah, we can do that. 

MS. HOMER: Okay. 

DR. MELIUS: And that would avoid the hotel issue, to some 

extent. 

MS. HOMER: Yes. 

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MS. MUNN: Only to some extent. 

DR. MELIUS: Where are we going to put --

DR. ZIEMER: Or it would minimize the --

MS. HOMER: The Westin. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- overnights, right. And that would be at 

NIOSH. 

Okay, is that agreeable? Any objections? 

 (No responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. So pencil that in. Does the Board wish 

at this time to also look ahead into the March/April 

time frame and set aside some dates? 

MS. HOMER: We already have, Dr. Ziemer, for April. 

MR. PRESLEY: I was going to say, we set aside --

DR. ZIEMER: That's right --

MS. HOMER: April in Richland. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yes, we --

MS. MUNN: We have 20, 21, 22. 

DR. ZIEMER: I see it, it's here. Actually we set aside 19 

through 23, did we -- did we finalize the dates? 

MS. HOMER: No, I haven't. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. We sort of --

MS. HOMER: Yeah, just keep that week open and --

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DR. ZIEMER: So that -- well, I think -- settling on it was 

going to be dependent on what you could find --

MS. HOMER: What was available, yes. Wanda and I are 

working on that right now. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. So that basically takes us up to May. 

That covers the next six months then. 

Question arose as to the possibility of a Savannah River 

Site tour. Bob, can you help us -- whether -- how that 

would be done? Is that something you can help with? 

MR. PRESLEY: Yes. Yeah, the guy that used to be the head 

of Savannah River is now at Oak Ridge heading up DOE so 

if y'all want to go to Savannah River, I can call him 

when I get back and see about a tour, if that's -- if 

that's what everybody wants, that's up to y'all. 

DR. ZIEMER: Are you okay on that, Ray? I wasn't sure it 

was -- okay. 

Let me -- let's get a straw vote here. Board members, how 

many of you would like to tour the Savannah River Site, 

show of hands quickly. 

MR. PRESLEY: Now it would have to be on Wednesday the 4th. 

The tour would have to be before the meeting because 

we're going to meet the 5th and 6th, so it would have 

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to be on a week day, the 4th. 

DR. ZIEMER: Show of hands, Savannah River Site tour? 

 (Affirmative responses) 

DR. ZIEMER: One, two, three, four, I would go if you had it 

-- I've been there a few times, but you can never see 

it all, actually. 

MR. PRESLEY: How many? 

DR. ZIEMER: Looks like five. 

MR. PRESLEY: Six, sev-- how many people on the staff? 

DR. ZIEMER: Looks like another five or so. 

MR. PRESLEY: So we're talking about 10 to 12 people. 

DR. ZIEMER: Again, this would be restricted. Right? 

Spouses --

MR. PRESLEY: Yes, sir. 

DR. ZIEMER: -- could not attend? 

MR. PRESLEY: Don't know about spouses down there yet. 

MS. MUNN: Nice boat trip. 

DR. ZIEMER: You can check on that, perhaps. 

MR. PRESLEY: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Okay, Cori? 

MS. HOMER: Absolutely. 

DR. MELIUS: Can I bring up one other issue regarding the 

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meetings? I think the suggestion was made yesterday in 

public comment period that we have availability 

sessions or, Larry, you want to call them a public 

comment session in the evening to accommodate people's 

work schedule and so forth, can that be arranged for I 

guess the next two meetings that are on the schedule? 

MS. MUNN: That's rough. That's rough, Jim. 

DR. ZIEMER: I would think it's sort of the Board's call if 

you want to meet in the evening, is it not? I mean --

now we couldn't have done it here 'cause Dave Brenner 

probably wouldn't give up the auditorium. But if we 

can find a spot... 

MS. MUNN: Well --

DR. ZIEMER: Do the Board members object? And we could 

adjust the meetings so that we didn't go all day and 

all evening, if you wanted to do that. 

MR. ELLIOTT: We may be -- I'd like to hear the sense of the 

Board, but we may -- as you think about this, we may be 

limited in our ability for space. Once we -- we have 

to contract this with --

DR. ZIEMER: With the hotel. 

MR. ELLIOTT: -- with the hotel, and given their 

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availability... 

DR. ZIEMER: We could look into that. Also during the 

public comment period today, if any of those who 

comment from the public might provide the Board their 

views on whether you think this would be valuable for 

members of the public to be able to attend in an 

evening session as opposed to during the day, why we'd 

be glad to solicit that input, too. We heard from a 

speaker yesterday that suggested that that might be a 

useful thing. 

There was one other thing suggested yesterday that had to do 

with making known -- outside of the perhaps the 

official routes of publishing in the Federal Register -

- to local people the presence of this Board. For 

example, it appears that there's not a crowd of Nevada 

people here at this meeting. And one would say well, 

what was the advantage then of coming to Nevada if in 

fact no one from this area attends? And one of the 

issues is how well do the -- particularly the potential 

claimants and workers in the area know that we really 

are here, so we need to be thinking perhaps about how -

- are there some other channels to develop that 

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information besides the official channels that are 

being used in the Federal Register, and I know there's 

a big e-mail list that -- and so on. 

Now obviously we can't drag people in off -- well, we could 

drag people in off the street, but -- but at least make 

sure that certain people know. I mean I -- they may 

not come anyway, but -- can we think about how that 

might -- I don't know if you've had a chance since 

yesterday and maybe the staff --

MS. HOMER: Dr. Ziemer --

DR. ZIEMER: -- can think about ways that might be utilized 

MS. HOMER: -- if I may... previous experience with other 

committees, and there have been other methods used to 

announce meetings. For example, a meeting announcement 

might be prepared and distributed to -- to various news 

agencies or newspapers, TV stations, things of that 

nature. I'm not sure exactly how we might go about 

doing that, but it's certainly been done in the past. 

I would have to also check into what our options might 

be in other areas, what -- what methods are being 

pursued by other committees right now. 

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DR. ZIEMER: We had a nice turnout in St. Louis, but I think 

you'd have to say that that's largely due to the work -

- the effort of the local person. Denise made special 

efforts to get people out. Maybe there are folks at 

other sites that might be key contact persons that 

might be helpful. I don't know if others have some 

ideas that might help here that --

DR. MELIUS: Can I just comment -- point out that -- not 

necessarily through any fault of NIOSH staff, but this 

hotel's had an active picket line up for the last six 

months by the building trades and therefore I don't 

think anybody from the building trades, which are most 

of the people we're talking about Nevada Test Site 

would come into this hotel to appear, and that's a 

major -- a major issue. 

DR. ZIEMER: Right. So is there some mechanism for 

identifying those kind of issues in advance? I'm not -

-

MS. HOMER: Well, when I contact the hotels to make 

arrangements in the future, I can always ask them if 

they are a unionized hotel or if there are any other 

union issues that I need to be aware of. But I have to 

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rely on the information that they provide me with. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, thank you. 

DR. MELIUS: I've had discussion with Larry. I think we can 

provide some additional information. You just happened 

to pick the one non-union hotel left in Las Vegas, at 

least near the strip, so -- probably why it was 

available. 

MS. HOMER: Well, I wasn't aware. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay. Now any other general comments, 

housekeeping nature, any other items we need to 

address? Wanda? Thank you. 

MS. MUNN: I guess one thing I would request in our efforts 

to better inform the public of our meetings, it would 

be most helpful I think if in our meeting announcements 

we mention what we do so that people do not have the 

mistaken notion that we are an adjudicating body or 

that we hear individual claims, because I think it's 

misleading for people to think they may have an 

opportunity to be speaking to people who will have a 

bearing on how their claim is viewed, when our 

responsibility is one of process, not of individual 

claims. It would be very nice to have more public 

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attention to what we are doing, but at the same time I 

don't think it's fair if we don't make it very clear to 

them what it is we are doing. 

DR. ZIEMER: A good point. On the other hand, we need to 

recognize that the process is within the framework of 

the individual claims, and sometimes a knowledge of 

what's happened in individual claims cases helps us 

understand where the process may or may not be working. 

MS. MUNN: This is true, no question. 

DR. ZIEMER: I think we all recognize that when we hear 

people relating particular stories, that we are not in 

a position to act on that particular case, but we may 

in the process learn something either about the site, 

about how claims are being handled and processed. So 

in that sense, I wouldn't want to discourage people who 

wish to come to the Board with -- and I think most of 

those who would come to talk to us, with some 

exceptions, general public individuals, truly in the 

general public, are people who have claims or are 

either directly or on behalf of a relative, and who may 

have concerns that they think that might help us in the 

process. So in that sense, we don't want to discourage 

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that. 

MS. MUNN: No, that wasn't my intent. No. No. 

DR. ZIEMER: Right. Yes, Henry. 

DR. ANDERSON: I mean one -- one thing that might help is if 

we were to put out and say we're very interested in 

hearing about people's experiences with the process and 

their -- you know, the interviews and -- and paperwork. 

I mean we heard about paperwork, but that might be the 

kind of thing to -- 'cause I would assume the people 

who are interested in coming are those that have filed 

claims and they want to indicate when they submitted it 

and how it's been processed. And I think feedback to 

us as to how --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

DR. ANDERSON: -- how --

DR. ZIEMER: And that's the --

DR. ANDERSON: -- even though it's going to be a biased 

sample, I think it is helpful to get a sense of what 

their perception is and things like that. 

DR. ZIEMER: Yes. Other comments or input on that or other 

related... And I think, Board members, if any of you 

have particular ideas on -- or can identify individuals 

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or groups that might be useful to contact at a given 

location, I'm sure the staff would welcome that. It's 

-- sometimes it's just a matter -- we can provide the 

information, but who do we send it to? So if we can 

help identify those, that would be useful. I assume 

that's the case, Larry? 

MR. ELLIOTT: Yes, absolutely. 

DR. MELIUS: And if it would -- helpful, at least for me, 

Cori, if you would let us know as soon as possible 

about the availability of a room for the evening, 

'cause that makes some difference in terms of how you 

outreach to people. 

MS. HOMER: Well, normally the room is available on 24-hour 

hold by contract. That's how I always set it up. The 

-- having an evening session will also have to be 

announced in the Federal Register. 

DR. MELIUS: Right. 

MS. HOMER: So that will have to be identified ahead of 

time, as well. I don't foresee that there'll be any 

problem having an evening session, as long as we know 

about it in advance and can announce it. 

DR. ZIEMER: And in fact an evening session could be simply 

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a time devoted for public comment, if necessary. We 

don't have to conduct other business necessarily. 

Okay, are there any other items dealing with the Board work 

schedule or administrative that need to be addressed at 

this time? 

DR. MELIUS: I have one follow-up to yesterday 'cause I'm 

not sure what the -- what the plan is. There was the 

Congressional letter from Quinn, Slaughter and Reynolds 

to the Advisory Board and --

DR. ZIEMER: Right, and that letter was addressed to me. As 

I indicated, I did study it on the plane coming out 

here. I want to discuss with the Department and 

perhaps with legal counsel -- some of the things 

suggested in the letter appear to me to be well 

outside the charter of this committee, but I need to 

identify that and I need to prepare a response to -- to 

those Senators. 

DR. MELIUS: Actually Congressmen, but --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, they were -- three Congressmen, I'm 

sorry. That's quite correct. 

DR. MELIUS: Can that be shared with the committee then so 

we --

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DR. ZIEMER: I'd be glad to do --

DR. MELIUS: -- can understand what's going --

DR. ZIEMER: I'd be glad to do that, and I think the 

committee has received copies of that, so you can --

you can reflect back to me if you have particular 

comments to me on that. But I will prepare a letter 

and that will be made available. 

BOARD DISCUSSION/WORKING SESSION
 

The next item on our agenda is further time for discussion 

and working session. I think we completed all the 

items before us. Is there any other item that needs 

discussion at this time? 'Cause if there is not, I'm 

going to suggest that we go ahead with public comment, 

but --

DR. MELIUS: Could we talk a little bit about the agenda for 

the next meeting then? 

DR. ZIEMER: We could certainly talk about agenda. That 

would be quite in order. 

DR. MELIUS: And I --

DR. ZIEMER: In fact -- yeah, let's kick that off. There's 

another workgroup that you're involved with, Jim, and 

maybe you could suggest --

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DR. MELIUS: I'd say the research group should have a report 

at the next meeting. I think Henry and I will figure 

out our schedules finally and maybe on Christmas Day 

we'll both be home in the office and do that, so 

research group's --

MR. ELLIOTT: (Inaudible) Russ? 

DR. MELIUS: Russ, yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: So the research subcommittee -- certainly be on 

that agenda. 

DR. MELIUS: I had suggested yesterday that -- requested 

that Jim Neton or someone give us a presentation on how 

the site profiles are being used in the individual dose 

reconstructions, just to walk us through some of that. 

I think that -- that would --

DR. ZIEMER: Sounds good. 

DR. MELIUS: At least for me that would be helpful. I don't 

know if others... 

MS. MUNN: Yes, I agree. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I'm assuming there you would like to see 

examples of dose reconstruction conducted under the 

site-wide document, under site-specific type documents 

with --

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DR. ZIEMER: Maybe both. 

MR. ELLIOTT: I'm sure both --

DR. MELIUS: Both, both, yeah, yeah. 

MR. ELLIOTT: -- and see kind of a sampling of those. 

DR. MELIUS: A sampling of those, but I think -- I'm going 

to leave it up to your discretion, but it would be I 

think helpful to look at -- particularly on a -- what I 

call a complex site, like Savannah River, how that's 

being used, and then some of the others, with then 

examples, you know, appropriately masked and so forth 

from, you know, individuals and what's being done. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Okay. 

DR. ZIEMER: Okay, good. Other agenda items that anyone 

wishes to identify at this time for that meeting? 

DR. MELIUS: Can we work on -- between now and -- some sort 

of way of getting moving forward on this possible 

subcommittee issue, how to --

DR. ZIEMER: The answer is -- the answer is yes, and I think 

I'll -- I'll commit -- and Mark and I have done some --

DR. MELIUS: Okay, yeah --

DR. ZIEMER: -- some work on that and -- and we'll prepare a 

-- I think a straw man document for us. I've also 

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asked Cori to provide me with the details on exactly 

what it takes to set up a subcommittee in terms of the 

structure and the ground rules. 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

DR. ZIEMER: So we'll provide all of that. 

DR. MELIUS: Good. 

DR. ZIEMER: So --

MR. ELLIOTT: That could be held under a general agenda item 

of -- like we have Board discussion and working 

session, so I won't -- I'll just leave it at that. 

DR. ZIEMER: But make sure -- well, we need to make sure 

that that's earmarked --

MR. ELLIOTT: You want a specific agenda item earmarked for 

that? 

DR. ZIEMER: Let's earmark it so it doesn't fall between the 

cracks. 

MR. ELLIOTT: So that's --

DR. ZIEMER: That will remind us --

MR. ELLIOTT: -- a discussion on subcommittee... 

DR. ZIEMER: This'll be a -- for lack of an exact title 

right now -- subcommittee on dose reconstruction. 

Actually it's broader than that, but --

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DR. MELIUS: Yeah. 

MR. ELLIOTT: Next meeting --

DR. ZIEMER: Subcommittee on dose reconstruction reviews. 

MR. ELLIOTT: At some point in time in the near future, 

probably your next meeting, you're going to have to 

identify, from the pool of completed cases, those that 

meet your -- your sample --

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

MR. ELLIOTT: -- for assignment. 

DR. ZIEMER: Right. 

MR. GRIFFON: I'm not sure I... 

DR. ZIEMER: Question? 

MR. GRIFFON: I mean -- yeah, yeah, we -- there's -- there's 

quite a few things we probably need to do or the 

subcommittee needs to do. I don't know that the 

individual reviews, if there's a large enough pool to 

sample a lot from right now, but -- but there's also 

site profile things and -- and other things we can get 

rolling on. 

DR. MELIUS: My recollection is that Pete Turcic is supposed 

to talk next time and -- about the outreach that 

they're doing? 

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MR. ELLIOTT: That is correct, he's made that commitment. 

DR. MELIUS: Okay. Would it -- would a presentation from 

NIOSH on your outreach sort of complement that and --

is that -- does that make -- make sense as a --

DR. ZIEMER: Put outreach on the budget (sic). Pete will be 

there representing Labor, and if there's some 

complementary things that NIOSH could say -- okay, 

here's what we're doing that complements what Labor is 

doing, it would be useful. 

Any other items? 

 (No responses) 

If in the interim something jumps into your mind that you 

think we ought to place on the agenda, you can let 

Larry know or you can let me know, because we'll 

develop the agenda jointly and -- and then you'll have 

another opportunity to see the draft agenda. It can 

always be modified. 

DR. MELIUS: Maybe Ted Katz can present the final SEC regs 

to -- next time. 

DR. ZIEMER: Am I not correct that the -- well, I won't ask 

the question. 

DR. ANDERSON: That was rhetorical. 

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DR. ZIEMER: Yeah. 

MR. GRIFFON: Paul, is there a possibility of -- since by 

next meeting we're -- all Board members are going to 

have a copy of the IMBA software, could we have a 

training session at night? This doesn't have to be on 

Board time or whatever, but is it possible to arrange -

-

MR. ELLIOTT: Like we did for NOCTAS? 

MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, yeah, like a training session. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, one of the questions will be can you have 

a training session at the location of that meeting, and 

that -- it might be that the training session would 

more easily be done at the special meeting in 

Cincinnati. 

MR. GRIFFON: Yeah, that's true. 

DR. ZIEMER: So we might -- we might, if it's possible at 

that time, have some of the Board members -- 'cause we 

can't -- we're not going to do it all at once as a full 

Board, but training sessions for individuals who might 

be available prior or after that meeting, as a 

possibility. They can -- they can look into it and let 

us know. 

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MR. ELLIOTT: I would offer this. At any point in time a 

Board member's traveling through Cincinnati and they 

want to stop by, they want to have an afternoon 

available to them, we'll give you some training. 

Right, David? 

MR. SUNDIN: I think I've been volunteered. 

DR. ZIEMER: Provided somebody's there to train us. Thank 

you. 

PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD 

We're a little early for the public comment period, but if 

the commenters are here -- and I think they are -- and 

are willing to proceed, first Denise Brock is here from 

the St. Louis area. And Denise, welcome and please 

bring us your comments. 

MS. BROCK: Hi, I'm Denise Brock, for the record. I have 

several questions today, as usual, and some comments 

I'd like to raise with the Board. 

First of all, I would again like to say thank you for coming 

to St. Louis. We really appreciated that. 

We've had a chance to look at the TBD for the Destrehan 

Street site, it's been a little bit of time since 

you've been there, and I would also like to know if 

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there has been any further discussion with the Board 

about coming back to St. Louis to address that with the 

claimants. Perhaps we could get a bigger meeting place 

and maybe more of a crowd this time and have time for 

Q&A? 

MR. ELLIOTT: The Board has not had that discussion, but at 

NIOSH there has been a discussion and a -- a plan of --

being developed to go around and, as we've done at 

Savannah River Site last month, as we're getting ready 

to do at Hanford next -- next month. I can't say today 

where we're at with regard to the schedule of -- of 

those site visits, but yes, we do intend to come back 

to St. Louis and -- and talk about Mallinckrodt. 

MS. BROCK: Wonderful. If -- if there would perhaps be any 

scheduling conflicts in the near future, if you would 

consider coming to St. Louis, I would be more than 

happy to -- to do whatever I could to help you draw in 

a crowd. I don't have a problem doing that, usually. 

MR. ELLIOTT: We will certainly be contacting you, Denise. 

MS. BROCK: Thank you, Larry. I also understand that there 

have been some more Mallinckrodt Chemical worker 

records that have surfaced in Georgia. Are you aware 

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of that or is that something -- I understood that it 

was just something that happened rather recently and 

that DOE managed to get ahold of those. Are you aware 

of that? 

DR. ZIEMER: We'll ask Richard Toohey if he can respond to 

that question. 

DR. TOOHEY: I'm not aware of DOE coming up with anything, 

but on one of our data capture trips to the Atlanta 

National Archives or Federal Record Center, whatever it 

is, as we routinely go searching through boxes looking 

for such, we did find some more files on Mallinckrodt. 

But I honestly don't know what they contained, but 

they -- they are certainly being reviewed, analyzed and 

would be incorporated into the Technical Basis Document 

if there was anything in there that we didn't already 

know. 

MR. ELLIOTT: We're not aware of anything that DOE has 

provided on Mallinckrodt at this point, so --

MS. BROCK: And perhaps --

MR. ELLIOTT: -- the discovery's been at -- at the benefit 

of our labor and ORAU's labor. 

DR. ZIEMER: Give credit where credit is due here. 

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MS. BROCK: And perhaps that's right, maybe that was a 

misunderstanding on my part. If I understand 

correctly, could that possibly be then internal -- or 

actual individual data on people or -- or site 

information or both, or you just --

DR. TOOHEY: I don't know. 

MS. BROCK: You don't know, that's quite all right. 

DR. ZIEMER: I'm sure as that becomes available, it will be 

incorporated --

MS. BROCK: It will be added to the TBD then as we -- we go 

forward. Thank you. 

And in reference to the Weldon Spring and Hematite 

facilities, claimants have noticed and commented on the 

fact that in NIOSH or ORAU correspondence that neither 

are listed as up and coming site profiles. Is there an 

expected time line on either one of those? And if so, 

could you give me an idea of that that is? And we're 

also somewhat curious, because they are all 

Mallinckrodt facilities -- I understand that obviously 

they were different materials that they were working 

with, but I'm a bit perplexed as to why they don't all 

get grouped into one, why the TBDs for that one 

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facility are not all done at once. 

DR. TOOHEY: Dick Toohey, ORAU, for the record. Okay, good 

questions. The -- we did, as a result of the St. Louis 

meeting, move Weldon Springs up on the list for site 

profile production, and we expect to be starting on 

that shortly after the first of the year. 

The other one, the Hematite facility, I -- I don't think 

that's on the drawing board. Unfor-- I don't have the 

list with me, unfortunately, but as always, we try to 

be responsive to the Board or -- or the public's 

interest and we can certainly move that up, and 

especially since, as you mentioned, sites did much the 

same thing, it should not be too hard to do. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. 

MS. BROCK: And that brings me to my next question or 

comment, and I think Dr. Toohey -- yeah, just stay; I'm 

sorry -- Dr. Toohey and I had spoke about this earlier. 

I've had several situations in where claimants are 

coming to me with a problem. A lot of times these 

workers worked not just at one facility, but perhaps 

two or even sometimes three. And the problem arises --

first of all, when perhaps there's a miscommunication 

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somehow or the records are missing, just -- perhaps as 

Mrs. Ehlmann spoke yesterday, her husband had worked at 

two facilities and for some reason, even within the 

same Department, she's getting different stories. And 

that causes a situation where perhaps if a worker was 

at the downtown St. Louis site and they are being dose 

reconstructed as we speak, perhaps that person could be 

dose reconstructed and compensable before having to 

wait for further TBDs to even be completed and so I was 

hoping that perhaps ORAU could take a look at any of 

the workers or claimants that have worked at more than 

one facility. And if in fact they were at the downtown 

site, could they be dose reconstructed just to see if 

they meet that compensability? 

DR. ZIEMER: Dr. Toohey? 

DR. TOOHEY: Simple answer: Yes. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. 

MS. BROCK: And for the record, I wanted to know if all of 

the phone interviews in the dose reconstruction for the 

Destrehan employees -- and that is just for the 

employees that worked at Destrehan or the St. Louis 

site -- are those -- are those all completed? 

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DR. TOOHEY: I wouldn't say they've all been completed, but 

as far as I know, all the ones have been completed 

where the -- we feel the files are ready to move into 

dose reconstruction. Some of them where people had 

worked both downtown and also Weldon Springs we kind of 

put on hold because we didn't have the Weldon Springs 

site profile done. Others, as we reviewed the files, 

we find some inconsistency or other problem, say the 

ICD-9 code doesn't match the cancer diagnosis or the --

the employment dates seem to be inconsistent or 

something like that, and we look at those and try to 

get that corrected before we actually queue them up for 

interview and dose reconstruction. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Further questions or comments, 

Denise? 

MS. BROCK: Sorry, just a few more. And actually I don't --

I don't think any more for Dr. Toohey. One thing that 

I noticed, and maybe I didn't correctly understand what 

I read, but I noticed that on the Technical Basis 

Document or actually on a dose reconstruction, I guess 

-- it's what it was, it was a dose reconstruction, the 

Dupree-Ellis -- Elizabeth Dupree-Ellis was cited, and 

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that just alarms me for the simple reason -- I guess 

this is a comment -- that she completely excluded 

internal dose, and I felt like she grossly 

underestimated things. I just wanted to make that 

comment. 

And I don't know if I can do this. I wanted to ask a 

question of Dr. John -- is it Moreau? 

UNIDENTIFIED: Mauro. 

MS. BROCK: Mauro? And I don't know -- can I ask it? I 

guess you won't necessarily be able to --

DR. ZIEMER: Depends on the question. 

MS. BROCK: Okay, can I say it to the Board, say yea or nay, 

either one? 

In reference to off-site exposure, Hematite, Weldon Spring 

and St. Louis I understand had a lot of residual 

radioactivity or ground water problems, air problems, 

things such as that. And I was curious if a member of 

the public could request Sanford Cohen & Associates to 

look into that? Like there's a situation in Hematite 

where there's residual radiation. The Department of 

Energy doesn't want the responsibility to clean this up 

because they're saying there was a problem with nuclear 

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subs. Everybody passes the buck and so nobody wants to 

clean up this mess. And I'm wondering how that can be 

addressed or how would I go about that and if that's 

something that they're able to handle. 

DR. ZIEMER: It seems to -- it seems to me that in terms of 

their role with the Board that that could certainly be 

inappropriate, but that's something the legal folks 

would have to address. 

MR. ELLIOTT: As a member of the public, you're -- the 

contract with Sanford Cohen & Associates is with the 

Board as a government entity, and they're given a 

specific charge, a specific scope of work that they're 

proposing against. And what you're asking for is not 

included in that scope. 

MS. BROCK: So find other health physicists. Right? 

Basically. 

MR. ELLIOTT: And you'd have to have the money to support 

that -- that effort. 

MS. BROCK: Right, or maybe attorneys would, I'm assuming, 

because I think that's what a situation was in another 

area, too. 

Let's see. And another comment was, in reference to dose 

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reconstruction, in or with the absence of datas (sic), 

I understand that there is to be the surrogate coworker 

data and the use of site profiles are extrapolation. 

My concern is, again, how do you know that these datas 

are -- you're using are not -- are even accurate? 

There is a distinct probability -- at least in the case 

of Mallinckrodt -- that there was altering or coverup 

of datas or numbers, if you will. And again, back to 

those badges, I -- I understand that somebody was 

referencing to badges; I think that was Dr. John -- I'm 

sorry, Morau, Moreau --

UNIDENTIFIED: (Inaudible) 

MS. BROCK: -- yeah, okay, Mauro, and I -- I've heard 

repeatedly from workers that these badges were useless, 

and it just is a grave concern of mine that when 

somebody's looking at a badge and you have two workers 

working side by side and one comes -- comes up red hot 

and the other comes up with a big fat nothing, and when 

you go in there to try to dose reconstruct these people 

and that badge is coming up with no reading, that is a 

big concern to me and I'm really afraid that when you 

use those sort of readings, I don't know how you can be 

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so sure that the datas are accurate, and I guess that's 

my comment. Thank you. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you, Denise. Let me ask if any Board 

members have questions. Yes, Jim? 

DR. MELIUS: I have a follow-up question -- I think it's for 

Dick -- but based on what Denise asked, though. But is 

the -- for the site profiles, is there a schedule of 

those site profiles, a sort of a listing --

DR. TOOHEY: Yes. 

DR. MELIUS: -- on the web site with an estimated --

DR. TOOHEY: It's not on the web site, but we supplied it to 

NIOSH, so I --

DR. MELIUS: Would it be possible to put on --

DR. TOOHEY: -- could get it --

DR. MELIUS: -- my -- I guess my question is would it be 

possible to put that on the web site so that people 

would, you know, have a way of knowing sort of what the 

schedule is and -- and you know, possi-- it doesn't --

doesn't have to be, you know, exact, but estimated 

spring of whatever, something like that or --

MR. ELLIOTT: We'll --

DR. MELIUS: -- (Inaudible) subparts are. 

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MR. ELLIOTT: We'll consider that. I can't give a guarantee 

today, but we'll consider that. This is a -- this is a 

plan that's being reviewed and evaluated right now for 

its feasibility and its realisticness -- if that's a 

word -- realism, I guess -- can we achieve it, so we're 

working toward that. 

DR. MELIUS: No, and I think if it -- once it's -- the plan 

is finalized, that's the point I think it might be 

helpful for the public to be able to see, you know, 

what you're -- you're planning on doing before it gets 

all... 

DR. TOOHEY: Can I make another comment, possibly partial 

answer to Denise's last one on accuracy of coworker 

data or badge readings or anything? I would just like 

to mention -- don't forget, every dose reconstruction 

we do contains an estimate of the uncertainty in that 

value. And many times that uncertainty can be very 

large. And then that gets run through the IREP program 

in the uncertainty on the probability of causation. 

And since we're at the 99 percent confidence interval 

for the decision criteria, a lot of the errors or 

inaccuracy in the point estimates that we get in the 

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workers are accounted for by including the uncertainty 

in those values. 

DR. ZIEMER: And many people don't realize that in most 

cases, larger uncertainties help the claimant because 

it spreads that distribution out more. It's one of the 

exercises I have my students do. They -- I give them 

some hypothetical problems to solve with IREP and to 

look at the effect of uncertainty on the award or on 

the probability of causation. Generally it tends to 

favor the claimant, the more uncertain that information 

is. 

Our next speaker from the public is Richard Miller. 

Richard, welcome. Richard's with the Government 

Accountability Project. 

MR. MILLER: Richard Miller, for the record. Good morning. 

I guess with respect to the schedule and agenda, I'd 

like to offer a plea for you to enjoy the lake effect 

off of Buffalo at some point. I think that there's 

enough interest in what's going on in western New York 

that I know there's probably going to be some other 

efforts to communicate with people up there. But there 

seems to be an awful lot of interest in the work of 

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NIOSH and the Advisory Board, and I think --

notwithstanding the delightful climate there, I think 

that might be worth looking at as a potential future 

location. There's certainly plenty of people I think 

would be happy to cooperate with the Board and NIOSH 

and in having either evening sessions or outreach 

activity to ensure a full and robust participation, 

given that it has one of the largest concentrations of 

facilities in the country. 

Second suggestion is -- is -- well, let me just -- as a 

footnote to that, I think it would be helpful to have 

some discussion about whether and if the Board or what 

policy the Board will address if people want to get a 

site profile reviewed. You -- Dr. Melius raised one 

letter that just came in from three members of 

Congress, and Dr. Ziemer said something to the effect 

of well, these are legal issues and I'll respond. But 

I -- I think there's a broader question here, which is 

you've got -- as you develop these site profiles and in 

those sites where there's some, you know, concentrated 

community interest -- certainly like St. Louis -- it 

wouldn't surprise me if you'll see more than one of 

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these come forward because the audit process is in fact 

the only check and balance on this program in -- in --

within the program's boundaries itself. I mean there's 

other checks and balances in government, but this is 

the -- the design of the program. And so, you know, I 

was sort of looking at -- at John Mauro's presentation 

and there was -- I saw there was like ten to 12, you 

know, DOE sites and four -- two to four AWEs, I'm 

thinking two to four AWEs, hmmm, well, what happens if 

you get six letters from six Congressional areas, you 

know, or districts or facilities wanting you to do site 

profile reviews? What do you say to them? Too busy, 

come back next year? Legally we can't take your 

request? I mean I don't know what the answer's going 

to be, but it seems to me there's -- there's probably 

an opportunity here for some -- for some policy 

development about what the Board takes in in terms of 

these kinds of inputs and then how do they get resolved 

and addressed -- or prioritized, for that matter? I 

mean you could spend all your time looking at uranium 

facilities and -- and miss Hanford and Savannah River 

in your site profile reviews, and so part of it may be 

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an allocation of resource issues. But I think that --

but on the other hand, I think there's this intense 

public interest and obviously Congress is an important 

stakeholder in all of this -- this program, as well. 

And I just -- I just think that given, you know, this -

- this -- the program is now ripening to the point 

where the audit function's going to start to take on, 

you know, flesh and bones and a real activity, that it 

would be very helpful -- 'cause I don't think this is 

something that ought to be dressed simply as a legal 

question. I think it's a policy question at large, so 

that's just my suggestion to the Board. You all think 

about how you want to address that. I have my own 

thoughts on that, but I don't know that this is the 

time to do it. 

The third question is -- has to do with Blockson Chemical. 

This is now the third time I've raised Blockson 

Chemical and I know that NIOSH and the Secretary of 

Health and Human Services haven't asked for the Board's 

opinion on Blockson Chemical, but I'm going to see if I 

can't spur you all to kind of stick your nose into this 

a little bit, 'cause it's a really interesting what I 

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think is policy question. Again, I don't think it's a 

legal question alone. And that has to do with whether 

or not you include, and how much of this chain of 

production you include, of radon exposure at these 

uranium phosphate facilities that were used for -- I 

mean -- I mean rock phosphate facilities that were used 

for uranium extraction. 

And the -- the -- oh, dear, I apologize. And I guess the 

thing that -- the thing that is interesting is --

excuse me, I thought I turned that off -- that's 

somebody else's. I don't know. 

That -- the Blockson Chemical issue -- I don't know, has 

anybody had a chance or -- just to the extent you have 

had a chance to look at the Blockson Chemical report, 

you'll see in there there's a section on radon which 

says reserved, so -- and -- and claimants have been in 

touch with me and I've had the pleasure of chatting 

with a number of people in the Joliet, Illinois area 

who have received their dose reconstruction reports. 

They have not been sent to DOL for adjudication. 

They're being held in abeyance at this point. And the 

question is, where along the food chain of this -- of 

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the intake of the rock phosphate through to the 

production of phosphoric acid and through the various 

precipitating processes and oxidation processes and 

through to the final uranium process and -- and so 

forth, do you or do you not include radon exposure? 

And I am aware that there are a variety and a diverse 

set of views because just like Gaul, this program is 

divided into three Federal agencies and -- and here I 

think each of the agencies may even have their own 

views on this subject. But it is as much a policy call 

about where you draw the boundaries around what 

constitutes attributable radiation exposure for 

purposes of this program as it is whatever some lawyers 

decide to concoct. And the reason I say that is, 

having had a chance to review the contract between the 

Atomic Energy Commission and Blockson Chemical, they 

purchased it by the pound. And so they wound up with a 

purchase of all of the inputs from the raw phos-- rock 

phosphate coming in from Florida all the way through 

until the uranium was extracted. And so the economic 

transaction would argue for a broad encompassing 

approach to including the radon exposure. And there 

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are other ways of slicing this would say but wait a 

minute, that rock phosphate also came in and was used 

to make trisodium phosphate, Tide detergent, and should 

the program be compensating people for making Tide. 

Right? I mean you could -- you could make that 

argument. 

And on the other perspective, one could say well, maybe 

there's a middle ground to be carved out here and --

and we can find some sort of discrete spot to carve it 

out because this was a multi-purpose facility. You 

could also argue that this facility's economic life was 

substantially extended and bolstered because they ma--

they did this uranium extraction, and it was a very 

lucrative contract for Blockson Chemical. And -- and 

but for this contract existed, that facility existed in 

-- in economically turbulent times when the fertilizer 

industry was definitely on the bottom of the commodity 

cycle. So there's a lot of ways to debate this 

question. I'm not here to present every single one of 

those choice points. 

I guess all I'm floating is that I think this is an item 

which is also ripe for Board consideration. Now that 

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doesn't mean that NIOSH is inviting your comment or 

even interested in your comment. But at the end of the 

day, I don't see how the Board can not look at this 

kind of question, because at the end of the day, you're 

going to be auditing it and these are generic issues to 

numerous phosphate to uranium processes. This isn't 

the only plant, as many of you know. So I just thought 

I would add that to your list of items where a 

deliberative process -- you could review the 

engineering reports. NIOSH I think has done an elegant 

job of laying out in the site profile the production 

process, so you could at least see it, maybe see the 

source documents, the contracts, and begin to grapple 

with this to figure out where do you draw the line. 

Otherwise, I think that -- that this is going to get 

decided behind closed doors. You're going to be left 

auditing something where it's going to be preordained 

whether or not you get to even examine that dose 

because the agencies have prejudged it. And I think 

what -- there's an ongoing deliberative process now. I 

don't think -- I don't know, Larry, maybe you can --

I'm prepared to stand corrected here, but I don't 

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believe that issue is fully closed, at least as of last 

week, so I just thought I'd lay that out as a -- a 

topic where I think your expertise in combination here 

would be really valuable. 

Am I to prepare to stand corrected, Larry? 

MR. ELLIOTT: I have no comment. 

MR. MILLER: Well, that gives you a flavor, unfortunately. 

Next item I'd like to put on the plate for the Board, I 

guess -- again, and -- and for NIOSH, it's just a 

suggestion that a policy be developed with respect to 

professional standards -- conflict of interest I guess 

is sometimes too narrow a term, but it -- we've all 

used it in shorthand here to cover the broad 

professional standards of -- of -- of -- that are 

expected here, that go well beyond financial conflict. 

And -- and -- and I just can't help but observe that 

it seems like almost every meeting we have kind of a 

dandelion coming up in the lawn of another conflict of 

interest sprouting. And it seems like it's largely 

attributable and -- and frankly, fortunately, that 

NIOSH was willing to provide some transparency on who's 

working on these teams, but people seem to be 

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identifying these things for you, and it seems to me 

this ought to be a Federal agency function up front. 

They ought to be combing through this issue up front 

and the public serves as a check and balance, rather 

than the public serves as the only policeman for these 

professional standards questions. And so I would just 

urge you all to -- to think very hard about whether you 

want to revisit this. As Jim Melius noted at the --

yesterday's meeting, in a way, a lot of us sort of 

thought the site profiles would accumulate the value of 

the knowledge of each individual dose reconstruction, 

and so the site profile and the conflict of interest 

issue really didn't ripen until -- as this program 

ripened. And I think it's worth re-examining. 

Otherwise we've kind of locked ourselves in to only 

looking at dose reconstruction and -- and -- and -- and 

not the site profile, and it may be the very fertile, 

raw material out of which each of the cookie-cutter 

dose reconstructions in some cases are going to be 

extracted. So I just would encourage you all to 

rethink whether it's maybe time to have a 

recommendation to NIOSH in a formal way urging some 

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kind of conflict of interest provisions which mirror 

those that are used by Dr. Toohey and others at Oak 

Ridge Associated Universities on the dose 

reconstruction conflicts. I just -- I don't know how 

many more of these you want to have sprout up before 

you finally take Board recommendation in this area. 

I would just offer this with respect to the evening meeting 

question. I think it varies. I think it goes from 

site to site. If you've got well-organized claimants 

or well-organized institutions that can help you do it, 

you know, it's where you are. Right? I mean I think 

there'll be lots of volunteers in western New York and, 

you know, maybe you'll have them, maybe you won't have 

them. And I think it ought to be -- I think you ought 

to figure out in advance -- if you're going to schedule 

an evening meeting, figure out if it's going to be 

productive -- right? -- and -- and not just do it and 

then have an empty room and sit there for two hours and 

close the record. So -- and I'm certainly happy to 

help NIOSH network with people where they're not 

already plugged in. And I'm sure there are others on 

and off the Board that would be delighted to do so 

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because I think it would be immensely productive and it 

would also promote greater understanding. I think 

there needs to be a two-way communication on this 

'cause it's complicated. 

Finally, I would just propose -- probably for the last time 

I'll raise it publicly, here at least -- but I -- I 

have -- will -- will sort of -- I guess raise the 

question -- I'm delighted that the Board is going to be 

-- apparently going to get trained and learn to use 

IMBA and all of those good things and -- and -- and I 

was delighted to read that if you want to go to 

Cincinnati, you can, even as a member of the public, 

have an opportunity to use IMBA. I -- I think there 

need to be some creative solutions to dealing with the 

proprietary software issue. I don't know how much 

creativity's been applied to it at this point, or maybe 

there's a way your support service con-- you know, Oak 

Ridge, could provide some kind of service so that if 

you don't want to provide proprietary software, at 

least you can make somebody available who can, for 

members of the public, make use of IMBA and IMBA 

outputs. It's -- it's a very difficult thing to take a 

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blank site profile which are where the doses are 

conveyed and -- particularly the internals are conveyed 

and, you know, DPMs or whatever with solubilities 

identified and -- and be able to replicate the results 

that NIOSH is providing to individual claimants. And -

- but more particularly, it becomes more important as 

you get into things like extrapolation where you don't 

have data and -- and I -- I would just encourage you 

all to think about whether it makes sense to have a 

program relying on proprietary dose reconstruction 

software where it effectively is inaccessible to the 

public except in the most -- except with a very high 

barrier, meaning that -- that the price tag for 

interacting with NIOSH or with this program or even 

this Board at a technical level is ponying up some six 

figures or five or six figures to get access to 

software. And -- and I -- I know I -- I respect that, 

you know, people are in the business of making money on 

their software programs, but you've got a public 

program here -- public compensation program relying on 

private software. And it -- it -- it -- I think it 

poses a transparency question and I would hope that you 

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all would -- once again, I'm revisiting this now for 

the third time; as I say, it will be the last time I 

revisit it here -- but I -- I -- I just think you've 

got a problem assuring transparency throughout, and 

this is a huge obstacle in that transparency, so I 

would encourage some thought to that. Thank you. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thankful -- or thank you, Richard, for your 

thoughtful comments. Let's take a minute and see if 

Board members have questions to pose to you relative to 

your remarks. Any? 

DR. MELIUS: Yeah, I have one question and I -- for both I 

guess Larry and Richard, and that's the Blockson 

Chemical -- if I understand that correctly -- and I 

don't understand it completely, but what's an issue --

more of a generic issue with a number of the AEC sites 

in particular where there's a sort of a commercial use 

and a -- commercial exposures or exposures from other 

industrial process as well as from the AEC process, and 

the issue is how you parse the exposures and do them, 

and I -- and I don't understand to what extent it's 

policy, legal or whatever, but I think certainly a 

briefing on that would -- at some point soon would be 

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very helpful to the Board so at least we understand 

what -- what's involved in the decision-making, as well 

as how it will affect future dose reconstructions, 

so... 

DR. ZIEMER: And Richard also entered into the public record 

some related comments. I think the Board members have 

gotten copies of your written comments on that Biloxi 

issue, Richard. 

Let me ask a somewhat related question. Does this revolve 

around the official definition of -- of the facility 

insofar as it relates to weapons production? 

MR. MILLER: You know what, it's like lawyers say, it 

depends who you ask. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, but -- but that -- that lies at the crux 

of it, as the starting point that it's defined in a 

certain way and then that gets interpreted. Well, 

where is that line exactly? Does it cover this -- the 

-- clearly there's radon related to the phosphate 

thing. I know -- I see Dr. Roessler here, who worked 

with phosphates a lot down in Florida and very much 

aware of the radon issues, but then the issue is where 

-- where does that end as far as what that company was 

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doing anyway and where does the -- the uranium work 

begin and were the uranium workers also exposed and is 

this part of their occupational exposure. That's --

MR. MILLER: It's a great set of questions, Dr. Ziemer, 

and it's --

DR. ZIEMER: Yeah, I --

MR. MILLER: Well, go ahead. I mean -- I didn't mean to cut 

you off. 

DR. ZIEMER: Well, and I think Jim is saying we -- we don't 

necessarily know what all those issues are, either. I 

understand that perhaps NIOSH has itself been 

addressing that or looking at that, and I don't know if 

you want to make any comments on that, but that's 

certainly been part of the issue. You're -- you're 

perhaps questioning whether or not the decision has 

been made and is fixed in concrete, and it may affect 

other facilities, as well. Is that --

MR. MILLER: Well, I think there's several things. I mean I 

-- I don't know what the final status of the 

interagency deliberations are in this. I know there's 

certainly some options and comments that have been 

circulated. I guess the question is, let's leave aside 

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the interagency debates for a moment and just step back 

by bringing to the fore what actually this Board 

brings, which is a remarkable rich diversity of 

expertise, and ask the question -- assuming that an 

atomic weapons employer facility lawfully encompasses a 

facility, broadly defined, and you're looking at the 

production of materials that are ultimately used for a 

nuclear weapons program where you have this dual-use 

issue -- right? -- commercial and non -- and non --

military and non-military, we'll say, or DOE and nonDOE -- where you then have to ask the question where it 

may even be inseparable, and let's assume that legally 

you can look at the whole thing. And then let's say 

okay, where does it make sense to tease it out? In 

other words, can we apply common sense to this 

question, 'cause it's a thought puzzle, I think. It's 

a thought puzzle. I mean -- you know, having sat down 

and kind of sketched out about five options, I could 

persuasively -- to myself, at least -- argue five 

different ways to draw the line on this thing. But in 

fact it's a -- partly a health physics question and 

it's partly a engineering question and it's partly a 

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policy call about how you deal with the equities for 

individuals, and it is -- I mean -- and -- and one 

could just -- I mean the myriad of equity issues just 

jump out at you. Right? Well, the -- so the person 

who makes rock phosphate and gets radon exp-- you know, 

processes this into phosphoric acid and they have radon 

exposures but they make Tide and they're not 

compensable, but the individuals who -- who make -- who 

-- who are part of the -- how do you even parse it out 

because the same person's making it for both -- both 

production chains. I don't have the -- the ri-- in 

other words, I'm not here advocating a particular 

solution, but I do think the options ought to be 

fleshed out because it's -- it is so important to the 

equities about whether or not you attribute dose that 

is at lea-- least partially attributable to the work 

that you're doing that wound up as part of this 

company's work for the Atomic Energy Commission or not. 

And it's not so remote that it's laughable. Right? 

It's just -- it's an equity issue. It's -- It's a 

Solomon-like activity, where are you going to divide 

the baby? And I think reasonable people could differ 

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on this thing, but I think it ought to be aired out and 

-- and I think it ought not be decided simply in an 

interagency deliberation process. Or to the extent it 

is, at least it would be useful if the perspectives of 

this Board were also informing the thinking of the 

Federal -- Federally-responsible officials in this 

respect. That -- that's sort of my pitch. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. 

MR. MILLER: Let me -- let me just -- just add one last 

thing, which is -- is -- is -- is since poor Larry 

often seems like my -- my good friend Eeyore who -- who 

-- who dreads coming to these meetings and -- and looks 

very unhappy most of the time, and I want to say 

something nice for Larry for a change, before I say 

something else, and -- so you can get off your pins and 

needles now. I found -- NIOSH's work on the site 

profile at Mallinckrodt begs numerous questions. 

Denise raised terrific questions, and I have them, as 

well. How are you going to deal with the periods of 

time where you don't have good dose information or any 

dose information, and how can we have any confidence 

that we're not estimating -- underestimating the 

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periods where you don't have dose data, and 

particularly when you're relying on, you know, 50-yearold methods of analysis. But in the course of the site 

profile, I found a terrific footnote for a document 

that at least I had been looking for for over a year, 

diligently, with numerous requests all over the place, 

by Merril Eisenbud and had -- was very pleased to see 

that it was footnoted in the site profile, and -- and 

in this Eisenbud document -- I don't know if the Board 

has had a chance to look at it, but it was the basis 

for an article that ran in the Riverfront Times, it's -

- it's called an estimate of cumulative multiple 

exposures to radioactive materials at Mallinckrodt's 

plants four and six from November of 1950. What was 

stunning, in addition to the level of doses that were 

estimated for a typical worker in the matrix that was 

used, which was about 1,000 rem to the lung over about 

a two-and-a-half-year period, was -- was the -- and 

this formerly secret memo said, and it just -- just to 

tickle your fancy, it -- it -- if I could just read one 

paragraph to you, it says here (reading) Early in 1947 

the New York operations office evaluated the potential 

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hazards in these plants and, after finding it to be 

considerable, recommended the necessary corrective 

actions. In addition, steps were taken by NYOO in 

cooperation with the contractor to institute procedures 

for effective environmental and personal monitoring. 

It was recognized that pending elimination of excessive 

exposures, here was a unique opportunity to conduct 

clinical studies on a fairly large-sized population 

whose radiation exposure for several years had been 

considerably in excess of any group for which data was 

available. 

And I just have to say that this really was a remarkable 

window in a candid memo about the perspectives that 

were in place at least at that time about how 

convenient it was to study the workers at Mallinckrodt 

without regard to how they were put in harm's way. And 

that really was the foundation of a lot of what 

informed the passage of this law. And every now and 

then these -- these -- these remarkable historical 

documents finally see their way to light and -- and I 

just would like to thank NIOSH for making sure that 

this one found its way to light and -- and they 

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produced it without need for a FOIA request and did so 

in a transparent way. And so I just wanted to express 

that appreciation. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. Thank you, Larry -- or thank you, 

Richard. Thank you both. 

Okay, that concludes our public comment requests. 

MS. BROCK: (Off microphone) Dr. Ziemer --

MR. ELLIOTT: She's thought of something. 

MS. BROCK: -- (Off microphone) can I make one more comment? 

DR. ZIEMER: Yes, you may. Denise Brock. 

MS. BROCK: I forgot to mention earlier, I -- in reference 

to what Cori and -- and Larry, I believe, were talking 

about how to alert people or media. I actually had a 

list recently that I used that actually listed all of 

the papers -- suburban journals, any paper that I could 

come up with through the state of Missouri and through 

Illinois, as well as the -- the news channels and the 

radios, and I sent letters out to each and every one of 

them actually looking for any of the 3,300 employees of 

Mallinckrodt or anybody involved in the building and 

construction trades. And I've gotten a lot of response 

from these papers saying that they are going to run ads 

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looking for -- for people that worked at these 

facilities. 

I was also contacted by some people in Illinois who are 

wanting me to come there to help them organize and kind 

of do what we did for the Mallinckrodt site, so I'm 

going to do that, as well. 

But I was curious if it's ever possible to do like a public 

service announcement, if that's possible, to put 

something like that on TV and maybe just try to get 

contact people in each area to alert claimants or to 

try to -- and I think that's probably part of the 

outreach with the Department of Labor, as well. 

DR. ZIEMER: Thank you. That's very helpful. We then are 

at the end of our open business session. Let me ask if 

any of the Board members have any additional items or 

comments for the good of the order? 'Cause if they 

don't, we are going to adjourn the public session. We 

will take our lunch break a little early. I think we 

probably -- well, in fact they do need to clear this 

room out anyway and prepare it for the big show 

tonight, so you need to get all of your stuff out of 

here. 

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We will reconvene at 2:00 o'clock in the Mesquite I Room --

the Mesquite I Room at 2:00 o'clock. I will, for the 

record, again emphasize that this is a session that is 

only for the discussion of the task orders and the 

independent government cost estimate. The Board will 

do no other business at that meeting. 

We now stand adjourned as far as the public meeting is 

concerned. Thank you very much. 

(Whereupon, the public portion of the meeting was 

adjourned.) 

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___________________________ 

 

345 

1 

2 Error! C E R T I F I C A T E
 

Error!
 

STATE OF GEORGIA ) 

) 

COUNTY OF FULTON ) 

I, STEVEN RAY GREEN, being a Certified Merit Court 

Reporter in and for the State of Georgia, do hereby certify 

that the foregoing transcript was reduced to typewriting by 

me personally or under my direct supervision, and is a true, 

complete, and correct transcript of the aforesaid 

proceedings reported by me. 

I further certify that I am not related to, employed 

by, counsel to, or attorney for any parties, attorneys, or 

counsel involved herein; nor am I financially interested in 

this matter. 

WITNESS MY HAND AND OFFICIAL SEAL this _____ day of 

January, 2004. 

 STEVEN RAY GREEN, CVR-CM 

 GA CCR No. A-2102 

NANCY LEE & ASSOCIATES